{"id":6,"date":"2008-07-10T08:07:22","date_gmt":"2008-07-10T14:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=6"},"modified":"2009-04-05T20:16:05","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T02:16:05","slug":"shaderx2-books-available-for-free-download","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/shaderx2-books-available-for-free-download\/","title":{"rendered":"ShaderX^2 books available for free download"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wolfgang Engel (editor in chief of the ShaderX series) kindly sent me copies of the two ShaderX^2 books last year, so that I could read through them and reference useful articles in writing the third edition of Real-Time Rendering<\/em> (RTR3<\/em>). He also provided us with the contents of the then-unpublished ShaderX^6 – he was a huge help in making RTR3 <\/em>up-to-date.<\/p>\n

While writing, I learnt that Wolfgang was willing to release the ShaderX^2 books electronically for free. However, he was advised by the publisher to check with the authors to see if they had any reservations. I like these books; some of the articles are dated, but there’s still solid material in many that should be made widely available. Also, I hated referencing articles in RTR3 <\/em>that few people could actually go look up. Finally, I found that the PDFs of these two books were already being distributed illegally through a torrent. It struck me as unreasonable that the two ways to obtain these out-of-print books was through illegal downloading or through rather exorbitant prices in used-book markets (currently the prices are down in the $30 range; at one point last year the lowest price I saw for one of the books was $100).<\/p>\n

Wolfgang didn’t have the time this Spring to gather permissions (he was busy at the time with GTA IV<\/em> and other projects), and I wanted to begin to repay him for all his help. So, I spent some time these past two months getting permission release forms signed for the ShaderX^2 books. 66 article clearances later, I’m done! There were no objections from the authors, usually just the opposite, so the books are now generously being hosted for free download by gamedev.net<\/a>:<\/p>\n

ShaderX2<\/sup>: Introduction & Tutorials with DirectX 9<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

ShaderX2<\/sup>: Shader Programming Tips and Tricks with DirectX 9<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The books are “ancient”, four years old, but there is some great material in them. Greg James’ article about rendering thick volumes has been cited by a number of later papers. I particularly enjoyed the articles by Mitchell et al. and Ansari in the Image Space section, as I love post-processing effects. They present lots of code snippets alongside solid theory. Which reminds me, we should also work on putting the CD-ROM’s contents up on the web – next task.<\/p>\n

Also, the first ShaderX book has also been cleared for free download. Wolfgang is digging through his archives for a PDF version of this book, and I hope it will be available soon. In the meantime, all of the articles from authors at ATI (at the time) are available on the AMD\/ATI website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/em> see the ShaderX Books page<\/a> at the ACM TOG site for a link to the first book and other related free resources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wolfgang Engel (editor in chief of the ShaderX series) kindly sent me copies of the two ShaderX^2 books last year, so that I could read through them and reference useful articles in writing the third edition of Real-Time Rendering (RTR3). He also provided us with the contents of the then-unpublished ShaderX^6 – he was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16,37],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-books","tag-shaderx2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}