The Current State of my Work Ethic

Is transitional. I swear it. I'm going to stop being numb and passive to life's opportunities and get somewhere with something. This will be a brief post, just explaining what I plan to follow through with and how I made the decision.

If you are reading this then you will know that I planned to start working through the book "OpenGL Super Bible 4th Edition" (Well, that is if you are the one person I read some of the book to). With every intention I planned to continue through with it, however I switched to the 5th Edition after reaffirming my fears that OpenGL 2.x and 3.x are quite different beasts (Also the current standard is 4.2 I believe, the 5th edition itself being 2 years old).

To my understanding, what's happened with OpenGL is that up until 2.x it was accumulative, that is to say that all previous functionality stayed even in the face of newer, faster and overall better ways to do things. As I read in Chapter 2 of the 5th Edition, all of this changed when 3.x came around, and functionalities started to become deprecated. Different modes or versions or whatever were created for people who couldn't or didn't want to move on, and things seemingly got much messier.

To break it down very simply, I am under the impression that...

• (OpenGL 2.x) stuck close to the classical graphics rendering pipeline
• (OpenGL 3.x, 4.x) do not, and are more heavily based in shaders

Which, when I realised this, made me annoyed that once again everything seems a bit ambiguous and I can't accurately measure what I will gain from investing time in either of these books. The 5th Edition just makes things sound like easy-mode by explaining that GUI will be handled automatically by GLUT. While I'm not against easy-mode, if I were going for tools that were of high ease to use, I would just start learning Unity (Which I'm now interesting in doing so sometime in the future, not now though).

What I'm going for is understanding. In my search for recommendations for which path to take, I saw "3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, 2nd Edition" recommended and just had to take a look.

Good things about this book include...

• Published in 2011
• Specifically for Graphics Programming
• Authors are qualified
• Excellent conversational tone of writing

So I made a decision. I'm going to go through this book and come out understanding it all. The benefits are three-fold:

• I will have a stronger understanding and therefore stronger abilities when I get to actually programming 3D computer graphics.
• I've been meaning (and needing) to learn the math I should have in highschool.
• I am undertaking a unit (Mathematics for Computer Graphics) this coming semester and working through this book will not only help me in the unit, but completing the unit after completing the book should cement the knowledge in my mind.

So that's that. I plan to complete a chapter daily. I don't know how dry or complex the lessons learned from the book will be to convey in blog posts, but I will do updates on how I am going.

Also, I'm seeing Prometheus tomorrow. Should be good.

 "Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems."

- Sherlock Holmes from A Study in Scarlett (1887)