Opengl Shading Language

• OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 2.1
• OpenGL SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference
• OpenGL Reference Manual: The Official Reference Document to OpenGL, Version 1.2
• Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs (Professional Computing)
• GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-performance Graphics and General-purpose Computation

I got slightly frustrated that it took several chapters to get into the meat of the book: before the authors got to creating useful shaders. But with hindsight, the basic material is very useful. There are gotcha's in the shading language, and the authors do a good job of making the path as plain as possible.

Even though fewer and fewer projects I work on (I work in the games industry) use OpenGL, the shading language is probably the most important addition to the OpenGL API for years. It is a standard, and the book was designed to document that standard. Most of the last section of the book is an in depth reference which is useful to have.

I found some chapters absolutely superb. But a lot of the book's material was wasted on me. The stuff on procedural shading is much better covered in other books. Generating a mandlebrot shader, for example, is hardly useful in a real project, in my opinion.

So I'd recommend the book to anyone who needs to understand GLSL. The bit that's useful is very useful, and I felt it was completely worth the cover price. The rest of the book, as my wife said, is a bit of a waste of trees.