Learning OpenGL

[Owain]

Hello, I want to learn OpenGL so that I can create a 3D game engine to base an open-world zombie game on. I am having trouble learning about OpenGL however. I have come accross two guides on the internet:

1) http://openglbook.com/the-book/
2) http://nehe.gamedev.net/ (The legacy tutorials)

Tutorial 1 is very up-to-date and uses the latest version of OpenGl, but it is unfinished and only covers a few rudamentry topics, not enough for what I need to do

Tutorial 2 covers a huge variety of things, everything that I need to know to make a game engine but its very outdated (OpenGl 1.x I belive)

I dont know whether I should just learn the out-dated one then adapt to the new version of OpenGL, but I am concerned that the diffrence is too great and I would have wasted alot of time learning out-dated information.

I learned C++ from a 1995 guide and it was actually very benefitial, it taught me the importance of memory efficentcy and other cool tricks that newer guides omit due to the massive amount of memory modern PCs have. Would this be the same principle when learning OpenGL?

Which one do you think I should go with? Or do you know of any other guides?

Thankyou for your time :)

[Computergeek01]

_{OP said:}

I learned C++ from a 1995 guide and it was actually very benefitial, it taught me the importance of memory efficentcy and other cool tricks that newer guides omit due to the massive amount of memory modern PCs have

I'm concerned here, what tricks do you think you learned? Any book from 1995 is at least two standardization's out of date and this can be very bad for your understanding of modern code and practices.

As far as your question goes, I jumped into the old version and you'll hit a brick wall I think around Tutorial 3 on nehe when you require a certain header file that isn't available anymore.

[Owain]

Well, tricks is the wrong word to use. Basicly it kept encouraging me to not waste memory even if it was just a few bytes.

As far as your question goes, I jumped into the old version and you'll hit a brick wall I think around Tutorial 3 on nehe when you require a certain header file that isn't available anymore.

Oh... thats a shame :( Do you think I should buy a book or something then?

[Computergeek01]

This might be worth buying a book over. I haven't done that yet myself so I couldn't recommend one for you, sorry :(.

[Owain]

Well, I'll have a look at some books on amazon. The only thing is that someone told me that books are not very good because alot of them are out-dated and there arnt any recent OpenGL ones...

[Moschops]

Sit tight and wait for the 8th edition of Dave Shreiner's "OpenGL Programming Guide" to come out. I think it's due in January of next year.

[Computergeek01]

Before spending any money this might be worth a look: http://openglbook.com/ I haven't read it myself but the price is right.

[Owain]

Before spending any money this might be worth a look: http://openglbook.com/ I haven't read it myself but the price is right.

That was the first tutorial I listed. It is indeed very precise and detailed, but its unfinished and only covers very basic features, not enough for a whole 3D engine. And its written in C, not C++

Sit tight and wait for the 8th edition of Dave Shreiner's "OpenGL Programming Guide" to come out. I think it's due in January of next year

Is this the book your talking about? http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-Programming-Guide-Official-Learning/dp/0321773039

[Moschops]

That looks about right. The previous edition still deals with the unholy mish-mash of OpenGL that was V3. If you're starting out, you're better off not having to know about that.