Modern OpenGL free documentation

[Guus Sliepen]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:41:47AM +0200, Sylvain Beucler wrote:

> OpenGL 2.x introduces a programmable pipeline with the new shaders
> system, and is notably available in mobile devices (OpenGL ES 2) as
> well as more recently in WebGL.
> 
> I was looking for free documentation on this "modern" OpenGL 2.x, and
> was disappointed to find little of it: most of what I found was using
> the "legacy" 1.x API, and the rest was non-free.  It's a gap to fill
> for the free gaming scene!

Hm, I did not have a problem finding the reference manual and some tutorials
online. There is much on opengl.org itself, and the NeHe tutorials are also
being rewritten for OpenGL 2.0. But indeed maybe there is nothing free in book
form yet.

> Consequently I started a on-going series of tutorials at WikiBooks
> (CC-BY-SA) beginning from scratch:
> 
>   http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming#Modern_OpenGL

Great!

> The code samples are in the public domain:
> 
>   https://gitorious.org/wikibooks-opengl/modern-tutorials/trees/master

I see you are using libglm for the CPU side mathematics, great ;)

> Comments and contributions welcome :)
> What do you think of it?

It looks great, although the teapot example is very complex compared to the
previous examples.  Maybe you can also make it more clear what the advantages
of the OpenGL 2.0 way are; at first the vertex arrays and shaders look like a
pain to work with compared to the old immediate mode and fixed rendering
pipeline. However, in the end, especially if you are using buffer objects, your
code will be much cleaner and the graphics will be faster.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
      Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
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