This is a book for beginning graphics programmers; it can also serve as a book for those familiar with fixed functionality who want to understand programmable rendering better. But this is not a book for beginning programmers.

You are expected to be able to read C and reasonable C++ code. If “Hello, world!” is the extent of your C/C++ knowledge, then perhaps you should write some more substantial code before proceeding with trying to render images. 3D graphics rendering is simply not a beginner programming task; this is just as true for traditional graphics learning as for modern graphics learning.

These tutorials should be transferable to other languages as well. If you can read C/C++, that is enough to understand what the code is doing. The text descriptions that explain what the code does are also sufficient to get information out of these tutorials.

Any substantial discussion of 3D rendering requires a discussion of mathematics, which are at the foundation of all 3D graphics. This book expects you to know basic geometry and algebra.

The tutorials will present the more advanced math needed for graphics as it becomes necessary, but you should have at least a working knowledge of geometry and algebra. Linear algebra is not required, though it would be helpful.

The code tutorials in this book use OpenGL as their rendering API. You do not need to know OpenGL, but to execute the code, you must have a programming environment that allows OpenGL. Specifically, you will need hardware capable of running OpenGL version 3.3. This means any GeForce 8xxx or better, or any Radeon HD-class card. These are also called “Direct3D 10” cards, but you do not need Windows Vista or 7 to use their advanced features through OpenGL.