I heard that the 5th version doesn't teach you OpenGL but explains a custom toolkit that the authors of the book made. If I have no experience in 3d graphics, should I get the 4th edition or are there better books to learn OpenGL? It'd be nice also if the books were OS agnostic because i'm coding in Linux.
The custom toolkit is only for the first few chapters where it explains the basics without having to explain all the complex underlying systems. It's actually quite useful if you're just starting out with OpenGL. After the first few chapters it goes straight into standard OpenGL calls. And OpenGL itself is OS agnostic, window creation isn't however, so the Superbible covers both WGL and GLX.
I have the 5th edition, it's excellent and I'd recommend it over the 4th edition.
I don't know anything about this specific book, but just looking at the table of contents on Amazon, I'd say that the 4th edition is horribly outdated. A vast majority of the book appears to be about the OpenGL 1.X fixed pipeline, which is inflexible, useless, and deprecated. The small part about the programmable pipeline is probably 2.1, which is still old-ish.
There was basically a complete overhaul of the OpenGL API recently, the revisions go like this:
OpenGL 1.X -- Fixed pipeline, simple hardware transformations and rasterization
OpenGL 2.X -- Sort of a transition period. Retains the fixed pipeline, but has shader program support tacked on.
OpenGL 3.X -- Fixed pipeline entirely removed in favor of a more flexible and more consistent programmable pipeline. Shader programs are [i]required[/i] to define OpenGL's behavior.
OpenGL 4.X -- Smallish updates, improved compatibility with OpenGL ES (for Embedded Systems, or phones), hardware tessellation.
You want a book on OpenGL >= 3.0 which covers compatibility with 2.1. Perhaps the 5th edition covers this.
Get the 5th edition, it's a complete rewrite that adapts to the new core profile of OpenGL 3.x.
Note that some users, like myself, can't use OpenGL 3 due to drivers.
OpenTK reverts to the highest context available ( removing the need to worry about that ), and its' not hard at all to do an if else statement for Major and Minor versions of OpenGL to write compatible code for older versions.
Even with your situation, nobody should actively be learning from deprecated learning material.
I'm still worried because there seems to be a lot of flak about the 5th edition with it's examples, is this true?
[url]http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-SuperBible-Comprehensive-Tutorial-Reference/product-reviews/0321712617/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1[/url]
I've noticed that the samples in the 5th edition basically give you only the relevant code as opposed to a full working example that you can run. You shouldn't be copy/pasting the examples anyways. It does a great job at explaining what everything is and how they work, sometimes I'll do a bit of extra research before implementing something in my game engine though.
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