graphics and multimedia

This is an excellent first book on Computer graphics using OpenGL - very accessible and enjoyable at the same time, with a good breadth of coverage as well.

I took a course under Prof. Hill while he was a visiting Prof. at the Indian Institue of Science, which used the draft of this book. We had a great time learning graphics with Prof. Hill - his enthusiasm is infectious, and this comes out in the textbook as well. We were able to develop a 'Tour of the Tajmahal' by the end of the course, with lots of special effects (like texturing, flying objects) - it was **beautiful** :-) !!

The book covers all the usual material expected in a Computer graphics textbook - transformations, modeling, texturing, hidden surface removal ........, as well as somewhat 'advanced' topics like ray-tracing.

The writing style is engaging and the explanations are very clear - this is a book that makes it easy to learn graphics. It also contains helpful tutorial material for all the maths background required, and a really huge number of exercises - obviously, you need not do all of them, just take your pick.

Please note that it is **not** a tutorial/reference on OpenGL - it merely uses OpenGL as the tool of choice for writing graphics code. If you want to learn OpenGL, please check out the 'Official guide to learning OpenGL' by Woo et al - we used that text in conjunction with this in our course, and it's really helpful for getting upto speed with OpenGL.

All in all, this is an excellent choice if you want an uptodate text on Computer graphics using OpenGL.

This is one of the better books on computer graphics theory I have so far come across, but please be aware: there are many holes in this hefty and pricy book.

Francis Hill has provided a very thorough book on computer graphics with numerous topics that will appeal to many readers. It is one of the only books to really cover ray-tracing to the detail that I like. While the book title implies the use of Open GL as one of the main concepts, this is misleading. The vast majority of all of the programming is simply in C++ which just uses Open GL to paint the screen. If you are looking to learn Open GL, pick yourself up the Red Book (OpenGL Programming Guide) or look on SGI's web site for all of the text free online.

While the text has a very broad scope, it is entirely lacking the organization, completeness, or concistancy to even approch an acceptable text on any computer subject, let alone a very complex one. Computer Graphics Using Open GL is riddled with errors. There are a great deal of typos in the code provided, and some code is just plain wrong. To add to the confusion, the small subsection of code that is available on the companion web site doesn't even match the code in the book; it is a single file with all kinds of code concatentated together, which itself won't compile.

Hill has also provided with his book one of the most frustrating things I have come across in ANY computer book I have read: half of the code is marked with such helpful comments like "To be implemented" or "students do here". The book is FULL of functions and variables that come out of nowhere or are never defined. As a result, you are left to fend for yourself, and are trying to piece together Hill's code into something that will compile. The pieces of code are presented as excercises, but you are never told how to actually do the things asked of you. Never, ever have I seen a book that basically says "Figure it out for yourself" and moves on. Additionally, Hill just loves to use one set of variables for a general example, and then a whole different set for the code (or pseudocode; it's often intermixed)

Basically, it's as if Hill had written a skeleton guide to graphics programming, and midway through fleshing it out, he simply stopped. The rest is up to you to figure out.

I elected to mention all of that because I want anyone who is considering the purchase of this book to know what is expected of them. This book has a very steep learning curve at points, and unless you are willing to put in a the effort, you will lose track of what's going on - Hill's text won't fill in for you. All of that said, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete book on graphics that even gives you a code-based presentation. The text, where complete, is very well written, and give you a number of things to consider while reading the material.

Three Stars.

This was used in my introductory course in 3D graphics for undergrad Computer Science. The author demonstrates his expertise in the subject by his thorough coverage of the material, as well the lucidity of the content within the book itself. What truly amazed me is how well he explained the Linear Algebra concepts (albeit basic) to those who have never taken Linear algebra. After reading a good portion of the book, I hav come to a few conclusions: the book does not focus on the OpenGL API simply because one must first understand the underlying math behind the API, I've noticed that having a good grasp of the mathematics helps w/ the construction of 3D applications regardless of what API you are using (there may be some slight retraining, but nonetheless, the math is the same).

The book merely uses OpenGL to demonstrate the concepts, but it is not meant to serve as an OpenGL tutorial - there are plenty of other tutorials out there, some are free, go read those instead. However, if you want to understand the mathematics behind the 3D components, then this is the book to read.

So now, why 4 stars if the book seems perfect? I would have given it a 5, but the exercises are too long, Chapter 6 contains an inordinate amount of exercises, some take over 20 minutes to finish (for one problem). Because the book doesn't focus too much on OpenGL, you'll find yourself reading another book for OpenGL itself. So if you're doing exercises in Chapter 5, and some later Chapters (7 and up), you'll find yourself hard pressed for an OpenGL reference.

Anyhow, the book is noteworthy and will make it to my library. I forgot to mention that as you read each chapter, the author stops and asks in parentheses (why?) to a certain topic. Again, it helped reinforce a lot of the concepts from prior chapters into my brain. This book is well worth the money.