Fundamentals of Computer Graphics

Rating:
Summary: Good Overview but has Some Bugs
Review: I think the book presents a nice overview to computer graphics. Some of the other books are so overwhelming with the breadth and depth of topics that it is hard to distill the important ideas. This book does a nice job of including all the basic algorithms and formulas necessary to build standard graphic programs.

I have found some errors in the formulas on ray tracing which lead to some headaches. Unfortunately, no errata page has been put up on the web as of this point (October 02). There may be others, but this is where I have spent most of my time.

Rating:
Summary: One of CG API-independent Books
Review: I use this book as a textbook for 3D Computer Graphics course. Before using this book, I've used Donald Hearns' and Jim Foley's. Compare to those two, I think this book cover the basic material without even touching API. This is what I like about this book.

On every chapter, there is an FAQ about materials covered. It also has an exercises for us to do, unfortunately no answers. It could also be very helpful, if there are Internet links on each chapter for us to ponder or if we would want to go detail into each chapter.

Sadly, this book doen't cover much about animation, which is one of the topic I'm focusing on. I also contain many errors, both in the formula and in the text.

Rating:
Summary: Great graphics text
Review: I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about writing a renderer. If you're wanting to learn about using OpenGL or just want quick information about creating graphics applications this is not the book for you (in that case I'd recommend the latest edition of the OpenGL Programming Guide).

For those truley interested in graphics this is probably the best book available. Shirley explains things in an intuitive way and supplements his explanation with examples and pseudo-code. This book is a perfect guide to writing a z-buffer renderer and is helpful for generating a ray tracer or path tracer. Supplementary reading might prove useful for writinig a ray or path tracer. Shirley's second edition of Realistic Ray Tracing (which should be out soon - the first had many mistakes) ought to be very good. He is a wonderful writer.

Rating:
Summary: Great intro to 3D graphics!
Review: This is a really good intro to the fundamentals of 3D graphics. The best thing about this book is that it is API-neutral, and so covers the material wihtout making specific references to API's. The material is explained very clearly and is easy to read. I would have liked some more guidance on actual implementation in code (e.g. using C to make it accessible to most readers, or using pseudo-code). Perhaps some canned demo programs would have been nice, to supplement the narrative.

I also bought Hill's book on 3D graphics with OpenGL(2nd Edition), and find the two books work quite well together.

I recommend Shirley's book as a first introduction to graphics theory >before< you start playing with an API!

Rating:
Summary: Best low-level graphics book out there
Review: This is an AI-neutral book and has an especially excellent discussion of the graphics pipeline in general, and transforms and triangle scan conversion in particular. It also has a good treatment of BSP trees and ray tracing. My only complaint is that it talks little about animation. My favorite thing about it is that it uses very clean math, and none of it is gratuitous.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful: errata page
Review: Though this text provides the reader with a thorough treatment of the basic and advanced topics of today's graphics algorithms and techniques, some errors pop up here and there which might be problematic when trying to program according to the book, or trying out the execution of an algorithm. An errata page has been provided by the writer which might be useful to readers of this text; it can be found at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~shirley/fcg/errata
I hope this helps some people out. I, for one, started sweating when it seemed like I did not understand BSP trees anymore; it took me a couple of minutes to see that a couple of lines were inverted in the accompanying code. However, this book is interesting, fun to read, and useful. I recommend it to anyone who already has a basic understanding of Computer-Graphics-Without-An-API.