Angel Edward, Shreiner Dave. Interactive Computer Graphics. A Top-Down Approach with Shader-Based OpenGL

6th Edition. — Addison-Wesley, 2012. — 730 p. — ISBN: 0132545233.This book is suitable for undergraduate students in computer science and engineering, for students in other disciplines who have good programming skills, and for professionals.Computer animation and graphics–once rare, complicated, and comparatively expensive–are now prevalent in everyday life from the computer screen to the movie screen. Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with Shader-Based OpenGL, 6e, is the only introduction to computer graphics text for undergraduates that fully integrates OpenGL 3.1 and emphasizes application-based programming. Using C and C++, the top-down, programming-oriented approach allows for coverage of engaging 3D material early in the text so readers immediately begin to create their own 3D graphics. Low-level algorithms (for topics such as line drawing and filling polygons) are presented after readers learn to create graphics.This book is an introduction to computer graphics, with an emphasis on applications programming. The first edition, which was published in 1997, was somewhat revolutionary in using a standard graphics library and a top-down approach.
Over the succeeding 13 years and five editions, this approach has been adopted by most introductory classes in computer graphics and by virtually all the competing textbooks.
The major changes in graphics hardware over the past few years have led to major changes in graphics software. For its first fifteen years, new OpenGL versions were released with new versions always guaranteeing backward compatibility. The ability to reuse code as the underlying software was upgraded was an important virtue, both for developers of applications and for instructors of graphics classes. OpenGL 3.0 announced major changes, one of the key ones being that, starting with OpenGL 3.1, many of the most common functions would be deprecated. This radical departure from previous versions reflects changes needed to make use of the capabilities of the latest programmable graphics units (GPUs). These changes are also part of OpenGL ES 2.0, which is being used to develop applications on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets, and WebGL, which is supported on most of the latest browsers.Note: the 7th edition has just been released and uses WebGL and JavaScript instead of OpenGL and C++. You can only use WebGL for this unit in 2014 with special permission, and you will need to adapt the project materials yourself.