OpenGL learning W/O internet access

OpenGL Development
#1

I’m spending time on a naval vessel in the next few months(nice long underway of more than 6 months). Essentially Internet access is worse than dial up, limited to certain times of the day, and a good amount of the Internet just doesn’t exist(Even getting an unlucky ad rotation can block a website for 30mins to a couple hours). To make things worse the computers used for the Internet are ‘public’ access and can’t be connect to my personal computer in any reasonable way.

So I’m looking for resources that are easy to download, and/or Available on the Kindle. But are essentially self contained references(as in multiple). Don’t really know enough to make some decent picks for myself, so just asking.

#2

Download documentation and/or ebooks

#3

Beginning OpenGL Game Programming is a good book to get you started if you haven’t used opengl yet, but other than that, download the docs.

#4

I can’t recommend a good book but I think you absolutely need one that doesn’t only serve as an introduction to OpenGL, but also contains a reference part. Most books are targeted towards C(++) programmers, so having a c cheat sheet might be important too if you don’t know the language (the OpenGL documentation uses C syntax and types as well).

Apart from that I think it’s crucial to have a lot of source code ready to study and tinker with, like https://github.com/mattdesl/lwjgl-basics. You’ll certainly find a lot of open source games and other frameworks around the forum that you can download, too.

In your situation it is certainly morally justifiable to use a web crawler, so I recommend you get one for your OS and download the OpenGL documentation, the OpenGL wiki (you should set a reasonable delay between page requests that does not overburden the server), tutorials on the LWJGL wiki (http://www.lwjgl.org/wiki/) as well as “Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programing”, an excellent - and free - introduction to OpenGL (http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/). Last but not least make sure you have the source and javadoc for LWJGL (usually included in the download).

I hope that helps a bit.
Good luck and don’t fall of the boat :~)

#5

Suggest buying
http://www.amazon.co.uk/OpenGL-SuperBible-Comprehensive-Reference-ebook/dp/B003XDU8B2/ref=tmm_kin_title_0
I haven’t looked at the kindle version to see if the formatting is Ok. Some ebooks suck badly. Also make sure you take a kindle that allows easy text entry, since you will have to use the search facility a lot. I think the lack of being able to flick through a book is a bit of a disadvantage. I still prefer paper reference books in most cases.

Also you would need the API of whatever java library your using, as it varies a bit (unless you are using C++)
If it’s LWJGL, you might need to scrape some off the wiki: http://www.lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Getting_started
In any case get the docs zip file, when you get the other LWJGL bits: http://sourceforge.net/projects/java-game-lib/files/Official%20Releases/LWJGL%202.8.5/

#6

Yeah I second the Arcsynthesis tutorials and you can download the code here to play with locally. The Arcsynthesis tutorials are completely text, with a few images, and no ads. This way you can download each page to a local folder and just read the text while following with the code.

Best of luck!

#7

Thanks for the help. Going to allow for a very nice start after I finish my current project.

Falling off is unlikely, they keep my rates in the engine room.

I learned the hard way about getting JavaDocs the last underway(only 15 days), Turns out that by default Eclipse uses an online reference for the Javadoc.