Intended Audience

OpenGL^® Distilled is intended for C++ programmers who are new to OpenGL.

This book assumes moderate familiarity with computer graphics. The reader should be familiar with graphics resources, texts, and algorithms. Graphics expertise is not required to make use of this book. The reader doesn't need to know how to code Bresenham's algorithm, for example, but should be familiar with the concept of scan conversion. Experience with another graphics API is helpful but isn't a prerequisite.

The reader should be familiar with the C++ programming language. The example source code on the book's Web site is in C++, and will build and run in Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS, and most flavors of Linux and Unix. Many of the code snippets in the book should be comprehensible to any programmer who is familiar with C and who has access to a C++ reference manual.

The reader should be familiar with vector and matrix mathematics as covered in a typical linear-algebra course. The reader should understand matrix concatenation and vector-matrix multiplication. Readers already familiar with transformation and coordinate systems from another 3D graphics API will find OpenGL^® Distilled an easy read. For readers unfamiliar with this subject, many general 3D graphics texts cover the subject adequately, such as Chapter 5, "Geometrical Transformations," in Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice.

The reader should, of course, be familiar with basic mathematics such as algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.