Advise on where to start.

Hello,

I’m an experienced programmer with some specific professional areas of expertise which do not include cross-platform real-time computer 3d graphics. However i want to move towards it, especially to the cross-platform part. I used to know a bit about opengl years ago which means mainly 1.4 stuff and as far as i understand it is getting deprecated know. Does this mean that all the old books on the subject are irrelevant now? Please advise where to start learning now, what books to use, e.t.c.

Best Regards,
Inso Reiges.

The Red Book or The Open GL SuperBible.

and IMO essential now… The Orange Book. (Details @ 3dshaders.com)

Other than that take a look at the 3.0 and 3.1 spec to see what is deprecated and where you should perhaps concentrate. Although the deprecated stuff will be around for a while AFAIK.

Your 1.4 knowledge should still stand you in good stead, but a lot has changed with the move to 3.0 / 3.1 so you will need to be aware of that moving forwards…

It’s worth noting that the 3.1 spec specifies legacy extensions which you can still use, and NVidea have said publicly that they will continue to support legacy code for quite some time. It would make sense that ATI are following suit.