re tom gaskins pexlib vs phigs programming manuals o reilly merlin neuro usc edu merlin writes could someone explain the difference between tom gaskins two books o pexlib programming manual o phigs programming manual why would i want to buy one book vs the other book i have an running sco unix x r on my desktop a sun iv in my lab and access to a variety of other systems alliant fx cray y mp on the network mostly we would like to do d modeling visualization of rat rabbit monkey and human brain structure rather than decide which book you want to buy you need to decide which programming interface you want to use then buy the appropriate book i wrote an article for the x resource which discusses the differences between phigs and pexlib it will appear in issue which should be out pretty soon but here s a brief summary phigs is a graphics api which was designed to be portable to many devices most implementations support the x window system and take advantage of a d extension to x called pex pexlib is a slightly lower level api which was designed to efficiently support the pex extension to x some advantages of using pexlib integrates with xlib xt motif etc better than phigs provides immediate mode capabilities is free of policy pex supports phigs but is currently being extended to support features not found in phigs like texture mapping anti aliasing pexlib will give you access to all of these features some advantages of using phigs support for multiple devices not just x based ones support for archiving metafiles hardcopy output phigs has predefined input devices to make input easier phigs can handle exposure events and resizing for you phigs can help you with colormap selection creation if you re working strictly in x and don t care about things like archiving i would go with pexlib either way you will find that both api s have a lot in common ralph mor mit x consortium
