This is my 30 years belated realization that PHIGS was a 'graphics' pun pretending to be an acronym. I'm not sure if that makes me hate it more or less. I'm leaning towards more. The focus on PHIGS was less welcome when I read Foley and Van Dam than the chapter on dot-matrix printing which at least had some timeless "how stuff worked" appeal. Teaching specific APIs in a textbook almost never ages well.
@pervognsen my uni graphics textbook (the name of which I don’t even remember, but it was crap) was based on GKS (Graphical Kernel System). Which existed for like a picosecond and I can’t imagine anything “real” actually used it.
@christer@pervognsen I still retain a residual fondness for F&VD, based soley on the fact that when I was an undergrad, and it was prescribed as a textbook, the Uni bookshop accidentally put the US price on it (vs the much weaker NZ dollar), which made it a massive bargain.
Though maybe not when you realised that even then only 20-30% of it was relevant.
Imagine if the newer edition had gone with Fahrenheit or Open Inventor. It's hard to pick winners except in hindsight. Even OpenGL 1.x wasn't really a safe pick, depending on your time horizon, though probably the best if you had to make a concrete choice. Maybe "timeless" is an overrated quality in a field as fast moving as computer graphics; on the other hand, that also meant we usually didn't have up-to-date books, and if you're going to teach more timeless fundamentals, please, no APIs.
I'm not sure of the state of CG textbooks today. Until the first edition of Real-Time Rendering came out, it was a wasteland of ancient books with dubious relevance outside of the bare basics; good luck even finding perspective-correct texture mapping covered in sufficient depth. And RTR was always more of a survey of recent literature than a textbook, especially in later editions. I remember liking Peter Shirley's textbook (first edition), but that's the last time I even opened a CG textbook.
Add comment