Preface

"NVIDIA's core strategy is to deliver a breakthrough product every six months, doubling performance with each generation at a rate of essentially Moore's Law cubed."

Jen-Hsun Huang

"Children crawl before they walk, walk before they runeach generally a precondition for the other."

Lillian Breslow Rubin

Computer graphics technology, like all computer technology, advances at a staggering rate. In the late 1990s, the first hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards for consumers signaled the dawn of a new age in 3D graphics software development. Already, these cards are gathering in landfills, superseded by more powerful and advanced hardware.

If you're new to OpenGL, you probably wish you could dive in and start writing advanced OpenGL applications. Although many advanced graphics programming books exist, most assume familiarity with OpenGL or some other 3D graphics Application Programmer Interface (API). Before you tackle more advanced programming tasks, you need a way to get up to speed on OpenGL quickly.