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Comment by furcyd | Hacker News Reader

I am preparing to teach a computer graphics course for the first time and have been reading up on WebGL, etc. It looks like this will be a nice intro to the lower level aspects of graphics. Thank you!

By the way, Eck's book at:

http://math.hws.edu/graphicsbook/

is REALLY helpful for learning WebGL.

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Thanks for mentioning it.

Do you think that book is a good source to learn "traditional" OpenGL?

The best book that teaches "traditional" OpenGL is the official OpenGL programming guide (aka OpenGL Red Book) and the OpenGL superbible.

Yes, Eck's book is also a good intro to OpenGL. It is the rare book that is both readable and covers both OpenGL and WebGL. Of course, it is not as comprehensive as the Red book. But, in my opinion, that also makes it a more approachable introduction to OpenGL.

Traditional OpenGL is not useful except as a history lesson. It will give you bad practices when you then try and use a newer API (not even counting DX12/Vulkan; the bad practices will stick with you even if you try to just use DX11/modern OpenGL). WebGL is a pared down version of GLES, which is still not perfect, but a big step in the right direction.

I wish there was a better cross-platform intermediate graphics API; Vulkan has a lot of challenges. Metal is very close but it's Apple-specific. Dawn/WebGPU/wgpu seems to be a nice fit in the middle, but it's still in development.

So would that book be a good way to get into graphics programming? I see that it uses OpenGL 1.1

1.1 is 22 years old.

I would not bother learning anything before OpenGL 3. The core stuff from 3 onwards is still reasonable for use today, and most changes build upon it rather than fundamentally changing the model, but the older stuff is quite different.

Teaching OpenGL 1.1 is like starting a chemistry course by going over alchemy. Begin with modern ideas, not the attempts to find phlogiston.

I suggest Anton's OpenGL 4[0] as a starter guide for modern GPU pipelines.

For a general graphics introduction I would recommend software renderer tutorials such as this JS one[1]. The problem that has made people split on whether to directly study modern OpenGL is that 1.x is much easier to configure because more parts of its pipeline are fixed-function. There are fewer lines of code involved and you have fewer episodes of "why doesn't it draw anything". Software rendering lets you get around that because you configure only exactly as much as you have built, and because you built it you understand it(to some depth). When you go to any current GPU API you have to grasp both what the hardware desires and the concepts you're looking for, and in practice the safest way to proceed is to very gradually build up and extend an example codebase so that you have a testing sandbox with easy to toggle modes for debugging, and then adapt that into the application.

[0] http://antongerdelan.net/opengl/

[1] https://kitsunegames.com/post/development/2016/07/11/canvas3...

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