Product Description
There is growing interest in the use of active control of image formation to simplify and accelerate scene understanding. AI research on machine vision emphasizes the use of declarative knowledge and explicit representation of goals to control the perceptual process. This book describes the first implemented vision system anywhere to integrate robotic camera control, ocular reflexes, reactive fixation, real-time image processing, image tracking, perceptual grouping, active 3D modeling, and object recognition. The book presents the results of the ESPRIT project BG 3038/7108 "Vision as Process" initiated in 1989. The presentation is organized as five parts which reflect the components developed for the resulting experimental test-bed system. ... Read more

Product Description
When 3D graphics capability on the PC became a reality,Microsoft wasted no time in offering a new standard:Direct3D(r). And Graphics Programming with Direct3D: Techniques andConcepts wastes no time in getting you up to speed on this importantAPI. Once you learn how to program in 3D with Direct3D, the sky's thelimit for developing compelling 3D applications. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

It's all theory!!!!
If you're looking for a book to jumpstart into the world of Direct X and 3D, this is not it!!! There's not a single piece of example code to be found anywhere... However, it does tells a lot about history and concepts about 3D graphics. Might be handy to have in your library. Still it's too expensive for what it is(luckily, I got it cheap... :)It's not something I would recommend if you want to start your 3D coding but if you know next to nothing about 3D graphics, it's good for theory and concept reference.

More advanced techniques than Direct3D
When I bought this book I was expecting a good guide to Direct3D to complement the other 5 I have sitting on my shelves.What I got instead was something entirely refreshing.It discusses techniques for actually applying 3D graphics to the real world, along with some little tips and tricks on Direct3D I wouldn't have realized elsewhere.Not for a DirectX beginner, but if you want more, check it out.

Not a very good book
While the book's title states that it is about Direct3D, it really isn't. Quite a disappointing book in my opinion. It really doesn't discuss Direct3D and has zero examples to draw from. There seem to be better books on Direct3D that are either out now or coming out soon. I'd try my luck there

don't buy it
Well the book is ok but you can get better info some where else (black art of 3d programming, etc). It give basic intro nothing big, and all it does is complane about how the 3d industry is. I thought this book was on direct3d programming, but i thought wrong. No programming samples in the book, but basic intro into the RM and IM api. If you need a reference on functions just buy direct3d pro reference. If you are new to direct3d programming the directx documents gives you the same or probably more info than this book. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume describes novel and state-of-the-art approaches to solvingproblems arising in the domain of embedded real-time systems. It isbased on the GI-Dagstuhl research seminar MBEERTS (Modelling-BasedEngineering of Embedded Real-Time Systems), which took place fromNovember 4th to 9th in 2007, at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany.Using models throughout the development bears several advantages. Notonly can they be used as a tool for abstraction but also forverification, implementation, testing and maintenance. Due to thespecific domain of real-time systems several constraints like real-timerequirements, resource limitations or hardware-specific dependenciesarise and impede the acceptance of high-level models for theaforementioned purposes. The approaches presented in this volume tackle those problems and leadthe way to a greater acceptance and applicability of high-level modelsfor embedded real-time systems. Therefore this volume contains 10 longerchapters covering broad areas and 11 short chapters discussing severalspecific state-of-the-art tools used for model-based engineering ofembedded real time systems. The topic of 'Model-based Engineering of Real-time Embedded Systems'brings together a challenging problem domain (real-time embeddedsystems) and a solution domain (model-based engineering). Today,real-time embedded software plays a crucial role in most advancedtechnical systems such as airplanes, mobile phones, and cars, and hasbecome the main driver and facilitator for innovation. Development,evolution, verification, configuration, and maintenance of embedded anddistributed software nowadays are often serious challenges as drasticincreases in complexity can be observed in practice. This volume is a collection of 10 long and 11 short papers that surveythe state-of-the-art in model-based development of real-time embeddedsystems. It is composed of longer chapters that cover broad areas andshort papers that discuss specific tools. This state-of-the-art survey - outcome of a Dagstuhl Seminar held inDagstuhl Castle in November 2007 - covers the essential aspects ofintegrated software and systems engineering in the field of model-basedengineering of embedded real-time systems. The topics covered include:frameworks and methods, validation, model-based integration technology,formal modeling of semantics, fault management, concurrency models andmodels of computation, requirements modeling, formal derivation ofdesigns from requirements, test modeling and model-based testgeneration, quality assurance, design management, abstractions andextensions, and development techniques and problems of applicationdomains. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Software Industry Report, published by Millin Publishing, Inc. on February 18, 2002. The length of the article is 1564 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: SOPHISTICATED CHART PLOTTING SOFTWARE INCORPORATES REAL-TIME EXCHANGE WITH NAVIGATION ELECTRONICS.(RayTech Navigator 4.0)(Product Announcement)
Publication: Software Industry Report (Newsletter)
Date: February 18, 2002
Publisher: Millin Publishing, Inc.
Volume: 34Issue: 4Page: 6

Article Type: Product Announcement

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
In life, time is money, and on the Internet, the size of data is money.Small programs and small files take less disk space and cost less to send over the Internet.Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers describes the basic algorithms and approaches for compressing information so you can create the smallest files possible. These new algorithms are making it possible for people to take impossibly large audio and video files and compress them enough that they can flow over the Internet.

* Examines the classic algorithms like Huffman coding, arithmetic compression, and dictionary-based schemes in depth
* Describes the basic approaches used to squeeze audio and video signals by factors of as much as 100:1
* Discusses the philosophy of compression to illustrate the underlying trade-offs in the algorithms
* Explores the use of wavelets and other modeling techniques that use repetitive functions to squeeze audio and video
* Shows how programming solutions like Adobe PostScript can save space and make networks more efficient
* Describes new approaches using fractals and grammars just being explored by the compression community
* Shows how to extend the algorithms and use them for copyright protection ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Lacks the details you need to put the algorithms to work
This book takes an algorithmic approach to discussing compression methods and tries to break down each method discussed into a brief explanation, some numbered algorithmic steps, and also some pseudocode. Images are included to demonstrate the result of varying parameters on various compression/decompression methods. The book does a pretty good job of giving you a feeling of steps the programmer will need to take, but it isn't detailed enough - and in most cases couldn't be given its short length - that you could perform a detailed implementation. 60 pages of the book concern compression patents and the bibliography and have nothing to do with algorithms at all.

This book could have contained a lot more detail, but it did manage to keep the mathematics to a minimum, which is probably in keeping with its "For Real Programmers" label. Do note that, contrary to what the title implies, there is no code included in this book. You must implement the routines yourselves from the given pseudocode and descriptions given. The book discusses common compression algorithms such as JPEG, MPEG, LZ, and Huffman, but in insufficient detail in most cases. This is a good introduction to data compression concepts, but I think "Introduction to Data Compression" by Sayood does a much better job of covering all the bases.

superficial, not an introduction for this programmer
I found this book very superficial and not much detail
in its descriptions. As a "real programmer (???)", this book
is not what I want. It does not give the in-depth information
that a "real programmer" would require, you might as well
go read the original papers with all the confusing and
obfuscating mathematics.

This book does has one big plus, one of the appendices (almost
50 pages) lists many, if not most, of the relevent patents
concerning compression.

A Solid Introduction to Compression Techniques
Mr. Wayner offers a fairly comprehensive introduction to a number of various compression schemes and techniques, ranging from simple substitution and dictionary based methods (such as Huffman-encoding) to more advanced algorithms (such as Fourier transforms, MP3 music, and JPEG image compression).

Note the word "introduction" in the title of the review, however.If you're looking for a comprehensive specification of a specific algorithm, this book is not the place to look.There are numerous papers and books digging deeply into a single algorithm or codec.Compression Algorithms will simply give you a broad understanding of the theory behind these compression techniques, along with some algorithms written in pseudocode or mathematical notation.

Compression by nature is a highly mathematical or algorithmic process, and so, by nature, the book may be slightly too mathematically inclined for some, but I simply can't fault the author for this, as any additional simplification of the material presented would have rendered it useless for real professionals looking for more than a sugar-coated description of the algorithms.

I had purchased this book for two reasons:Firstly, I am the sound programmer for a game development company, and sound compression is an important part of today's interactive computer entertainment titles.Coverage of sound compression techniques was advertised, and I feel I got my money's worth because of the information I obtained.This may seem strange since a cursory glance of the book will show the chapter on audio compression to be only 8 pages long.However, a deeper inspection will show that the chapter builds on a great deal of earlier material that, although not specific to audio compression, negates the requirement for a lengthy chapter later.Perhaps the only fault with this is in book organization.Secondly, because I will be creating a proprietary compression system, it is important to have a broad understanding of many different compression techniques in order to create the most versatile hybrid compression scheme for our sound engine.To this end, the book also does a great job.It certainly may be necessary for me to follow up with some books on specific algorithms, but without having first read Mr. Wayner's book, I would not have known about those algorithms in the first place.

I've given the book 4 out of 5 star because the book seems a bit short (177 pages, excluding the appendices) for the price, and for subjecting me to no less than 24 images of his foot (he couldn't have found a more interesing image as an example?).Overall, though, I found the book well written and extremely valuable for the work I plan to start very shortly in my new position.

Useful, but filled with many, many errors.
Despite the title, "Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers," the true audience for this book is not only programmers, but anyone who would like a brief introduction to compression algorithmsand the patent politics impacting their use.The book is ratherlightweight on details of the algorithms; as such, it is a good overturefor programmers, but a dangerous source from which to create software, as"real" programmers often do.

This book was an introduction tothe field for me, and for that I found it valuable.However, even though Iam a compression neophyte, I found many errors in the examples and theexplanations. What concerns me is that if compression novice, as I am, canfind errors, how many more hidden errors are in there that I could notdeduce?These mistakes often made it difficult to understand thealgorithms the author is trying to explain.Not only must one try tocomprehend the algorithms, one must first determine what the authoractually meant to write. In addition, there are errors in grammar andtypesetting that impact the smooth reading of the sometimes complex text.

The book would have benefited greatly from a careful reading by threeeditors: a technical reading by someone in the intended audience, atechnical reading an expert in the field, and a literary reading to smoothout the writing, correct the grammar and point out the typesetting errors.Had the author and editors been more careful, I would have given the textfour stars rather than the two.

Use it as a first book, an introduction,for ideas, and source for references.However, follow up on the referencesbefore proceeding to create even a line of code.

Useful, but filled with many, many errors.
Despite the title, "Compression Algorithms for Real Programmers," the true audience for this book is not only programmers, but anyone who would like a brief introduction to compression algorithmsand the patent politics impacting their use.The book is ratherlightweight on details of the algorithms; as such, it is a good overturefor programmers, but a dangerous source from which to create software, as"real" programmers often do.

This book was an introduction tothe field for me, and for that I found it valuable.However, even though Iam a compression neophyte, I found many errors in the examples and theexplanations. What concerns me is that if compression novice, as I am, canfind errors, how many more hidden errors are in there that I could notdeduce?These mistakes often made it difficult to understand thealgorithms the author is trying to explain.Not only must one try tocomprehend the algorithms, one must first determine what the authoractually meant to write. In addition, there are errors in grammar andtypesetting that impact the smooth reading of the sometimes complex text.

The book would have benefited greatly from a careful reading by threeeditors: a technical reading by someone in the intended audience, atechnical reading an expert in the field, and a literary reading to smoothout the writing, correct the grammar and point out the typesetting errors.Had the author and editors been more careful, I would have given the textfour stars rather than the two.

Use it as a first book, an introduction,for ideas, and source for references.However, follow up on the referencesbefore proceeding to create even a line of code. ... Read more

Product Description
A hands-on teaching and reference text for chemical engineers
In writing this book the authors' have focused exclusively on the vast majority of chemical engineering students who need a basic understanding of practical process control for their industrial careers. Traditionally process control has been taught using non-intuitive and highly mathematical techniques (Laplace and frequency-domain techniques). Aside from being difficult to master in a one-semester course, the traditional approach is of limited use for more complex process control problems encountered in the chemical processing industries. When designing and analyzing multi-loop control systems today, industry practitioners employ both steady-state and dynamic simulation-based methodologies. These 'real time' methods have now all but replaced the traditional approach.
A Real Time Approach to Process Control provides the student with both a theoretical and practical introduction to this increasingly important approach. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this text introduces all of the applied fundamentals of process control from instrumentation to process dynamics, PID loops and tuning, to distillation, multi-loop and plant-wide control. In addition, students come away with a working knowledge of the three most popular dynamic simulation packages. The text carefully balances theory and practice by offering students readings and lecture materials along with hands-on workshops that provide a 'virtual' process on which to experiment and from which to learn modern, real time control strategy development.
Features:
* The first and only textbook to use a completely real time approach.
* Gives students the opportunity to understand and use HYSYS software.
* Carefully designed workshops (tutorials) have been included to allow students to practice and apply the theory.
* Includes many worked examples and student problems. ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Dynamic 3D Imaging Workshop, Dyn3D 2009, held in Jena, Germany as an associated event of DAGM 2009, the main international conference of the "Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Mustererkennung".

The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers cover a range of topics of current interest: fundamentals of ToF- sensors, algorithms and data fusion and applications of dynamic 3D scene analysis.

Product Description
This digital document is an article from New York Times Upfront, published by Scholastic, Inc. on March 11, 2002. The length of the article is 868 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Who needs human actors? As digital characters become more real, advances in technology threaten to make actual people obsolete in Hollywood. (arts).(Brief Article)
Author: Dave Kehr
Publication: New York Times Upfront (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 11, 2002
Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
Volume: 134Issue: 11Page: 24(2)

Article Type: Brief Article

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2009, held in Liege, Belgium, October 13-15, 2009.

The 21 papers for oral presentation presented together with 24 poster presentations and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 96 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on human-machine-interaction, sensors, features and representations, stereo, 3D and optical flow, calibration and registration, mobile and autonomous systems, evaluation, studies and applications, learning, recognition and adaption.

Customer Reviews (7)

Excellent book
Written simply and clearly, I found it really interesting to read. Tho sometimes I'd wish more maths here...

Outstanding reference
The first half (28 chapters) of this book address the needs of the graphics programming master, or master-to-be. This goes way past the basics of GPU programming and language, and dives directly into solutions of demanding problems. This includes techniques for adding complexity to a visual environment at modest cost, real-time modeling of grass in the wind, softened shadows, and dozens of other aids for efficient and believable rendering. Some techniques address non-photorealistic techniqes as well. Together, they add a big handful of new tools to the toolbox of even advanced GPU developers. (Beginners: I'm sorry, but this isn't for you. Some day, just not today.)

I have to admit, though, my interest lies largely in the last 20 chapters. In this section, authors from university and industry research teams describe "GPGPU" - general processing on GPUs. This puts the incredible computing power of the GPU to use on tasks from linear algebra and differential equations to finance, computer vision, fluid flow, and medical imaging, instead of rendering viewable pictures. GPGPU promises huge performance increases over standard CPUs, but imposes huge barriers to realizing that promise. GPUs achieve their high performance by tailoring their physical architecture to a specific class of computations. That class is large, granted, but still covers only a tiny portion of today's compute-intensive tasks - and if your computation doesn't match the GPU model, you're just out of luck. These chapters offer tips'n'tricks for overcoming the architectural barrier, for rethinking applications in terms that GPUs can handle effectively.

GPGPU has been around for only a few years, largely as isolated acts of individual cleverness. No organized body of knowledge and practice exists for explointing this computational resource, and none seems likely to exist for some years to come. Every body of knowledge goes through that stage, "button collecting" of scattered, unrelated facts, the necessary elements from which larger patterns will some day be drawn. This collection, even if hit-or-miss for any one reader's needs, does its part to collect today's techniques and to disseminate that knowledge. Maybe some day, GPGPU will be as common and systematic as C programming is today - until then, anthologies like this are what we have, and this is a good one.

-- wiredweird

A comprehensive resource - but not for the novice
Truly Matt Pharr and NVIDIA are at the top of their game, and his "GPU Gems" series is certainly the only one of its kind for graphics professionals that are familiar with GPU's and shading languages already, and want to exploit them for the maximum speed and effect achievable using today's technology. It is not a "how-to" book on shading or GPUs or even advanced graphics. There are equations and code interspersed throughout the book, with bits of wisdom that are very instructive for the initiated. However, if you are a home-grown graphics programmer who knows C, or C++, or Java, and even some assembly language, plus you are familiar with image processing and computer graphics techniques, that will probably not be enough to get you through this book. I would say that this is a five star book for high-level professional graphics programmers who work with GPU specifics and shaders daily, and I would say it is a two or three star book for everyone else.
The one section of the book that is pretty accessible to anyone with knowledge of computer architecture and computer graphics would be section 4 of the book, which is about general purpose computation on GPU's themselves. That section has a series of articles that comprise an excellent tutorial on GPU's, what they are, and what they can do. It is the best material in print I have seen on the subject.
If you want a good introduction into the concept of writing shaders plus practice with an actual shading language, try "OpenGL Shading Language, 2nd Edition" by Rost, assuming you already know OpenGL. For a great on-line resource for modeling and graphics that will get you going in the right direction of knowing what the authors of these articles know, type "Elias Hugo" into Google and check out the first address shown. There is a wealth of on-line articles, complete with math and pseudocode, available there. Then, maybe, you will be ready to sift some knowledge from this "GPU Gems" series.
I notice that the table of contents is not shown by Amazon, so I list the articles here:
PART 1:GEOMETRIC COMPLEXITY
Towards Photorealism in Virtual Botany
Terrain Rendering using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps
Inside Geometry Instancing
Segment Buffering
Optimizing Resource Management with Multi-Streaming
Hardware Occlusion Queries Made Useful
Adaptive Tessellation of Subdivision Surfaces with Displacement Mapping
Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping with Distance Functions
PART 2:SHADING, LIGHTING, AND SHADOWS
Deferred Shading in STALKER
Real-Time Computation of Dynamic Irradiance Environment Maps
Approximate Bidirectional Texture Functions
Tile-Based Texture Mapping
Implementing the Mental Images Phenomena Renderer on the GPU
Dynamic Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting
Blueprint Rendering and "Sketchy Drawings"
Accurate Atmospheric Scattering
Efficient Soft-Edged Shadows Using Pixel Shader Branching
Using Vertex Texture Displacement for Realistic Water Rendering
Generic Refraction Simulation
PART 3:HIGH-QUALITY RENDERING
Fast Third-Order Texture Filtering
High Quality Antialiased Rasterization
Fast Prefiltered Lines
Hair Animation and Rendering in the Nalu Demo
Using Lookup Tables to Accelerate Color Transformations
GPU Image Processing in Apple's Motion
Implementing Improved Perlin Noise
Advanced High-Quality Filtering
Mipmap Level Measurement
PART 4:GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTATION ON GPUS: A PRIMER
Streaming Architectures and Technology Trends
The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture
Mapping Computational Concepts to GPUs
GPU Computation Strategies and Tips
Implementing Efficient Parallel Data Structures on GPUs
Flow Control Idioms
GPU Program Optimization
Stream Reduction Operations for GPGPU Applications
PART 5:IMAGE-ORIENTED COMPUTING
Octree Textures on the GPU
High-Quality Global Illumination Rendering Using Rasterization
Global Illumination using Progressive Refinement Radiosity
Computer Vision on the GPU
Deferred Filtering: Rendering from Difficult Data Formats
Conservative Rasterization
PART 6:SIMULATION AND NUMERICAL ALGORITHMS
GPU Computing for Protein Structure Prediction
A GPU Framework for Solving Systems of Linear Equations
Options Pricing on the GPU
Improved GPU Sorting
Flow Simulation with Complex Boundaries
Medical Image Reconstruction with the FFT

Excellent Second Book in the GPU Gems Series
This book is the second installment of the GPU Gems book series by NVIDIA. Just like the first book, GPU Gems 2 is a collection of articles by various authors from game development companies, academia, and tool developers on advanced techniques for programming graphics processing units (or GPUs for short). It is aimed at intermediate to advanced graphics developers that are familiar with the most common graphics APIs. The reader should also be proficient in C++. As with the first GPU Gems book, GPU Gems 2 is not for beginners. For professional graphics and game developers, however, it is an excellent collection of interesting techniques, tips, and tricks.

The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of GPU programming. Compared to the first book, more emphasis is put on the quickly evolving area of general-purpose computation on GPUs (also called GPGPU). In particular, the last three of the six parts of the book are about GPGPU and its applications. The first three parts, however, are about real-time computer graphics.

The first part of the book contains 8 chapters on photo-realistic rendering that mostly deal with how to efficiently render a large number of objects in a scene, which is a necessity for rendering convincing natural effects, such as grass or trees. Two chapters in this part of the book discuss geometry instancing and segment buffering, and another chapter focuses on using occlusion queries to implement coherent hierarchical occlusion culling.
Other interesting topics in this part of the book include adaptive tessellation of surfaces on the GPU, displacement mapping - an extension to the popular parallax mapping used in some current games - that allows to render realistic bumps on a simple quad, and terrain rendering with geometry clipmaps.

Part two of the book consisting of 11 chapters deals with shading and lighting. This part contains highly interesting chapters on deferred shading in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and computing irradiance environment maps on the GPU in real-time. Furthermore, this part of the book has chapters on rendering atmospheric scattering, implementing bidirectional texture functions on the GPU, dynamic ambient occlusion culling, water rendering, and using shadow mapping with percentage-closer filtering to achieve soft shadows.

The third part of the book consists of 9 chapters on high-quality rendering. Most chapters in this part deal with implementing high-quality filtering in fragment shaders. For example, there is an interesting chapter on filtered line rendering and another chapter on cubic texture filtering. Finally, a GPU-only implementation of improved Perlin Noise is also presented in this part of the book.

The chapters in the fourth part of the book represent an introduction to the fantastic field of GPGPU. The 8 chapters of this part first describe the general streaming architecture of GPUs, and then move on to show how to map conventional CPU data structures and algorithms to the GPU. For example, textures can be regarded as the GPU equivalent to CPU data arrays. There is also a chapter on how to implement flow-control idioms on the GPU and a chapter on optimizing GPU programs.

The 6 chapters of part five of the book are on image-oriented computing and describe a number of GPGPU algorithms for performing global illumination computations, for example by using radiosity, on the GPU. There is also a chapter on doing computer vision on the GPU
The final chapter in this part of the book explains how to perform conservative rasterization, which is important for some GPGPU algorithms to achieve accurate results.

The final part of the book has 6 chapters that present GPGPU techniques to perform a variety of simulation and numerical algorithms on the GPU. One chapter shows how to map linear algebra operations onto the GPU and develops a GPU framework to solve systems of linear equations. In other chapters the GPU is used for protein structure prediction, options pricing, flow simulation, and medical image reconstruction. These chapters show good examples of how the GPU can be used for non-graphics-related tasks.

The book contains many illustrations and diagrams that visualize the results of certain techniques or explain the presented algorithms in more detail. All images in the book are in color, which is definitely advantageous for a graphics book. In my opinion, the excellent quality and also the quantity of images and illustrations is one of the strongest points of this book compared to other graphics books.

The book also comes with a CD-ROM with supplemental material, videos, and demo applications to some chapters. Most of the applications include the full source code, which makes it easy to experiment with the techniques presented in the book. Note that most of the applications run on Windows only and many of them require a shader model 3.0 graphics card.

I highly recommend this book to any professional working as graphics or game developer. It is a valuable addition to my library of graphics books and I will come back to a number of articles in the near future. The focus on GPGPU in the second half of the book is a welcome addition and we can expect to see more and more non-graphics-related applications make use of the processing power in today's GPUs.

Pretty pictures
This book is targeted at people who have a good solid grasp of either OpenGL or D3D as well as a grounding in programming languages such as C/C++ or Java.While this much is obvious, the book is still painfully difficult to get anything useful out of.
The problem amounts to the fact that there is no cohesion between chapters - each one is written by a different author (and clearly they have not read each other's material) - there is no reference or introduction but worst of all, no common terms.
Example; What D3D calls a "pixel shader", OpenGL call "fragment shader", but there are also "vertex shader", "vertex program", "pixel program" and "fragment program"...some of these are the same thing while others are wildly different, but I found at least 4 references in this book to what I could only make sense of by substituting another term (the correct one).Each author has written their part from their own view point using their own terms.
The code snippets contained rarely have any comments or even descriptions of how they work.
Overall I generally felt like I was either reading someone's thesis or a marketing spiel about a particular aspect of some game.
There are many pretty pictures though. ... Read more

Product Description
This new book series covers essential tools and techniques for programming the graphics processing unit. Brought to you by Wolfgang Engel and the same team of editors who made the ShaderX series a success, this volume will cover advanced rendering techniques, engine design, GPGPU techniques, related mathematical techniques, and game postmortems. A special emphasis is placed on handheld programming to account for the increased importance of graphics on mobile devices, especially the iPhone and iPod touch. ... Read more