games

The authors state early on that this book is intended as the first book an aspiring game programmer should read, and I would agree that for the most part it lives up to that goal. Many 3D game programming books include math primers covering a chapter or two, but really, 3D math is a huge topic deserving an entire volume. This book provides a great service, then, in that it thoroughly covers most of the basic topics that graphics programmers need to know, in a tutorial style that should be accessible to all beginners. Hopefully, we'll start to see more game programming books that focus on their core material and defer coverage of 3D math to books like this one rather than trying to pack unavoidably incomplete coverage into a few dozen pages.

So, what exactly does it cover? It starts off with a couple of chapters on coordinate systems, and then spends three chapters on vectors, followed by another three chapters on matrices and transformations. It then covers orientation, comparing matrix, Euler angle, and quaternion representations (including one of most clear explanations of quaternions that I've encountered), before diving into several chapters covering geometric primitives, including detailed coverage of working with triangle meshes.

The book closes with a chapter applying 3D math to graphics in areas such as lighting, fog, coordinates spaces, LOD, culling and clipping, and so on, and another chapter on visibility determination, touching on things like quad- and octrees, BSP trees, PVS, and portal techniques. The explanations in these chapters are much less complete, taking more of an overview approach. Others have criticized the book for this, but I feel that an overview is appropriate, since it then sets the stage for these topics to be covered in detail in other game programming books.

I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone just getting started with game and graphics programming.

I need to create a 3d math library for a project I was working on and wanted to take a look at some book on the subject. This one looked like one of the 14 year old 'how to make a video game' type books and I wasn't expecting much, however I was pleasantly suprised by the depth of the 3d mathematics in the book.
As an example i was unclear about how to calculate the inverse matrix correctly for an n-dimension matrix and the book goes over calculating adjucts and determinats, and inverses for a n-dimensional matrix both supplying the general math and some C code. The code i didn't find helpful, simply because I coding in the python c api and not straight c, however it could be helpful to someone writing in C.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking to brush up on quaternions, eulers, matrices, and vectors as this book is simple and to the point. I think the author did a great job balancing the complexty of the math with simplicity in the book's text. The book goes over what is really the essentials of any 3d math library.

I RECENTLY RETIRED AND DECIDED TO PLAY AROUND WITH GRAPHICS AND GAME PROGRAMMING, AND THIS BOOK IS JUST PLAIN EXCELLENT!!!!!. I WISH MORE AUTHORS COULD WRITE TECH SUBJECTS THIS WELL.

THANK YOU FLETCHER DUNN AND IAN PARBERRY!!!