OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 4.3 8th Edition

tl;dr: Kindle Edition is perfectly readable and code samples are nicely formatted.I purchased the Kindle Edition of this book and browsed through it on a Kindle Paperwhite. This review is about the formatting only, not the book's contents.The diagrams and tables are very easy to read. They are displayed as images, so the text and lines are a little soft. A few of the renderings don't display well on a small grayscale e-ink screen (figure 6.13, for example), but this is fairly minor and I think the text provides enough explanation.Code samples are included as text, and fit just fine in widescreen mode. In portrait mode the lines wrap, but the code is still readable. Links to images of the code are also included before each samples, which is a great fall-back.There are a significant number of links in the text to other sections of the book. This is nice for reference, but it can make it harder to read if you like to "tap" through pages rather than "slide", since you have to make sure to avoid the links.If you're still unsure about purchasing the Kindle Edition, remember that Amazon has a 7-day return policy on ebooks. You can buy the book and browse through it before deciding whether to keep it.

This book is a MUST-HAVE for every openGL programmer. Not less than a "bible" for openGL related.I own previous edition (7th edition) & the thing I like most about this edition is the fact it was rewritten (from scratch) to use modern openGL approach instead of using old legacy deprecated functions.Also, the book has great deal of information regarding the GLSL, which I understood somehow similar to the orange book (don't own this book, yet).The only disadvantage I found was some lack of notes for completeness of example given.I'll give example to better explain what I mean -On Textures chapters, there is a code sample that explains how to bind vertex data & texture coordinates into a VAO & Buffer. Then we're attaching a texture on the QUAD. What is not mentioned, is that without having a fragmenet shader with code line similar to "outColor = texture(tex, texCoord);" the texture would NOT be visible. Now, I was pretty sure that I was doing something wrong somewhere, till i've downloaded the code samples & saw it in there...A small note before/after example regarding "fragement shader" assumed would be appreciated to avoid confusions on reader's side.

Alright. So I bought this book (actually I preordered it somewhere about 10th of january LAST YEAR (2012) ) and it finally got to me.First hopes were - please let it be different than previous version (where it was difficult to build program without deprecated functionality). I started reading it and was pretty happy that it did not suffer from this.After reading first 6 chapters, chapter 9 and chapter 10 I have to say - OK, everything is organized and the book indeed IS REFERENCE GUIDE and not tutorial. But that is still alright, because every chapter starts with basic things and explains them simply. Than it starts to get complicated, as the more advanced features are discussed. When I was reading the chapters sequentially, I alwais had a problem with understanding the end of chapter. But after reading another chapter (and slowly getting to referenced parts - some topics jump between chapters - some does jump a lot), it became a little clearer to me.Overall this book explained in the end most of the topics I needed (with very little gaps!) and I was able to build advanced example program (assignment outside of this book) by combining the techniques I read from this book.Ok now for the negatives - I am disapointed, that the webpage still does not have any sourcecode on the webpage. They promised on the site, that they will fix this in a metter of days. The webpage (according to returned headers) did not change in anyway for almost month now.Another problem I discovered are the helper libraries (3rd party) which they mentioned for operating with matrices and vectors on the client (CPU, aplication). I found just 1 library with that name and I wasn`t able to get all the capabilities which they use in the examples. But basicly - this whole library is not a part of opengl and can be substituted (or even ommited) and everything will still work (maybe you would just need to read further book to understand what these libraries does - as it IS thoroughly explained in the book).Also chapter with tesselation is very short and not explained to the details (for example - I had to google out why would anyone use tesselation shaders instead of geometry shaders (which I felt were superset of tesselation shaders) - which were for me far more intuitive) - and I had some troubles understanding how to use them...Overall - I have this book for about 2 weeks and I already covered and understood about 300 pages including some advanced and new staff. But I had an advantage, that I studied this subject before (in school, previous redbook and superbible). Still I can say that this one is the best source on new opengl functionality I ever had my hands on....

I'll start by saying that this book has a lot of useful information. It is however in rather desperate need of a team of editors. I'm not good enough at 3D stuff yet to be able to critique the math, but there are loads of typos and even incorrect references to other parts of the text. The information it presents is also in an entirely inconvenient order. Many times you'll be reading along and feeling like you are missing something only to eventually come across a line like "don't worry, we'll talk in more detail about XYZ later." If I need that knowledge to not feel lost where I am, shouldn't it be in the book before I got here?