The Book of Shaders (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Book of Shaders (2015)

thebookofshaders.com

43 pointsthrowup23811 comments

Excellent.

I love how shaders have progressed from "a clever hack to do fancier things in the hardware" to "a general-purpose parallel computing coprocessor." Particularly fun is how best practice these days is to do as much as you can in the shader. Where is the object's position? In this texture. Okay sure but where's its velocity? In that texture, so we can just update the position by re-rendering the first texture. Okay, but we need to accelerate these objects... Cool, pass me an acceleration texture.

This has been the stock recommendation for learning fragment shaders for as long as ive been interested in them (~5 years), and has gotten no closer to completion in that time I think. Sign of the quality of the stuff that is there that it still gets recommended I guess.

Books of this nature don't need to be completed to be useful and high quality.

A book about shaders that doesn't teach basic 3D lighting? I think at least that bit if nothing else should be finished.

I didn't make any claim around the quality of "The Book of Shaders", I was objecting to the unqualified implication of the OP that a book is low quality due to being incomplete.

If OP had expanded on why it was low quality other than just saying it's incomplete then I wouldn't have raised it.

Every so often this gets recommended again, and every time it does I can't help but not recommend it. Not because the content isn't very good, it's quite informative, but it's incomplete, and cuts off just as things are getting really interesting. It's been nearly a decade since the last update, but there are just better resources out there these days.

Better resources, like what? Please share links.

This is a great series if you’re looking for a tutorial. https://lettier.github.io/3d-game-shaders-for-beginners/inde...

I dunno, I disagree, this kicked off my understanding of shaders and gave me enough of a foundation to explore the unfinished topics on my own. I think it's a fantastic resource and, sure, could benefit from having its unfinished chapters rewritten as a "further explorations for curious readers" section.

The Book of Shaders (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117536 - July 2022 (22 comments)

The Book of Shaders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497924 - June 2020 (26 comments)

The Book of Shaders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15599935 - Nov 2017 (37 comments)

The Book of Shaders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457322 - April 2016 (15 comments)

The Book of Shaders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215582 - March 2015 (40 comments)

I just started working through this over holiday break, and it's been a joy! I can also recommend this awesome video from kishimisu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4s1h2YETNY

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