Well, newish books, from the past year. By the way, I’ve also updated our books list with all relevant new graphics books I could find. Let me know if I missed any.
This post reviews four books from CRC Press in the past year. Why CRC Press? Because they offered to send me books for review and I asked for these. I’ve listed the four books reviewed in my own order of preference, best first. Writing a book is a ton of work; I admire anyone who takes it on. I honestly dread writing a few of these reviews. Still, at the risk of being disliked, I feel obligated to give my impressions, since I was sent copies specifically for review, and I should not break that trust. These are my opinions, not my cat’s, and they could well differ from yours. Our own book would get four out of five stars by my reckoning, and lower as it ages. I’m a tough critic.
I’m also an unpaid one: I spent a few hours with each book, but certainly did not read each cover to cover (though I hope to find the time to do so with Game Engine Architecture for topics I know nothing about). So, beyond a general skim, I decided to choose a few graphics-related operations in advance and see how well each book covered them. The topics:
- Antialiasing, since it’s important to modern applications
- Phong shading vs. lighting, since they’re different
- Clip coordinates, which is what vertex shaders produce