This is a book for beginning graphics programmers; it can also
serve as a book for those familiar with fixed functionality who
want to understand programmable rendering better. But this is
not a book for beginning programmers. You are expected to be
able to read C and reasonable C++ code. If “Hello, world!” is
the extent of your C/C++ knowledge, then perhaps you should
write some more substantial code before proceeding with trying
to render images. 3D graphics rendering is simply not a beginner
programming task; this is just as true for traditional graphics
learning as for modern graphics learning. These tutorials should
be transferable to other languages as well. If you can read
C/C++, that is enough to understand what the code is doing. The
text descriptions that explain what the code does are also
sufficient to get information out of these tutorials. Any
substantial discussion of 3D rendering requires a discussion of
mathematics, which are at the foundation of all 3D graphics.
This book expects you to know