Initializing OpenGL: A Sadistic Approach to Modern OpenGL

A book written in my own spare time, that has notes on how to begin an OpenGL project. The main goal of writing this book, is so a complete beginner can follow along and learn as much as they can with a ton of information as possible. And it is because of this goal, I need to cite a lot of references and do research to make sure the information I got is accurately represented to the readers. And it will take a while to complete each chapter.

Currently, the book is not done, but I am releasing an "alpha" version of the book. It's provided both as a DOCX file, and a PDF file for viewing pleasures. This is a reward for you searching and lurking on Github, or that somehow this book was found by a search engine, and you just so happened to see this book appearing in the search results. And thus, it is why this book is secretly hidden away online.

DOCX file must embed system fonts for compatibilty with Windows, MacOS X, and Ubuntu/Linux.

Scroll on down to see the future roadmap. Table of Contents will be updated whenever new contents are added to the draft.

Table of Contents

PREFACE ........................................................................... 1 
CHAPTER 1 ......................................................................... 3 
	Installation .............................................................. 4 
	Picking Your Poison ....................................................... 5 
	Development Setup ......................................................... 6 
CHAPTER 2 ........................................................................ 11
	Choosing an OpenGL Version ............................................... 12
		Drawbacks of Very Old OpenGL Versions ............................ 13
		Consider the Not-So-Old OpenGL Versions .......................... 15
		Summarized OpenGL Initialization Steps ........................... 17
	Creation of a Window ..................................................... 18
		Using the WinMain() Entry Point .................................. 19
		Using the Main() Entry Point ..................................... 21
	A Dummy OpenGL Context ................................................... 23
		The Pixel Format Descriptor ...................................... 24
		Understanding Pixel Formats ...................................... 27
		Choosing and Setting a Pixel Format .............................. 31
	Initialization of OpenGL ................................................. 34
		Introduction to Loading Libraries ................................ 34
		Modularizing our Entry Points .................................... 36
	Hybrid Graphics Support .................................................. 37
		Brief History of Intel Integrated Graphics ....................... 37
		Handling the Consequences of Dual Graphics ....................... 39
	Summary .................................................................. 46
		Full Source Code (Including Notes) ............................... 46

REFERENCES ....................................................................... 58 

APPENDIX ......................................................................... 62 
	A Hungarian Notation Trick ................................................ i 
	Documented Quirks ........................................................ iv 
		ShowWindow Getting Ignored on First Invocation ................... iv 
		The “sprintf” History ............................................. v 
	Byte Ordering (Part 1/3) ............................................... viii 
	A Unicode Primer (Part 2/3)................................................ x 
		What is Unicode? ................................................. xi 
		UCS-2 ............................................................ xi 
		UTF-16 ........................................................... xi 
		UCS-4 and UTF-32 ................................................. xv 
		UTF-1 ........................................................... xvi 
		UTF-8 ............................................................ xx 
		What is next? ..................................................xxiii 
	Applying Unicode (Part 3/3) ............................................ xxiv 
		Making Common Functions ........................................ xxiv 
		Converting UTF-16 to UTF-8 .................................... xxvii 
		Converting UTF-8 to UTF-16 ..................................... xxxv 
		Converting UTF-32 to UTF-8 ...................................... xli 
		Converting UTF-8 to UTF-32 ..................................... xliv 
		Converting UTF-32 to UTF-16 .................................... xlix 
		Converting UTF-16 to UTF-32 ..................................... liv 

Roadmap

(Updated: January 1, 2019 - Included scheduling conflicts with real-life into the timeline.)
(Updated: March 20, 2019 - Adjusting schedule to update the book only on weekends.)
(Updated: August 4, 2019 - Finished Triangle/Hexagon OpenGL back in July, was about to write book, but real life got in the way.)

Sneak Peek

This is what I planned to add to Chapter 3 before something happened in real life:

How to Contribute

I welcome those who contribute by reporting an Issue. Those who do, will be listed as a co-author.

Just state the summary of the topic and list out what you wished to read about. If possible, if you have resources and research materials provided in the Issue report, I'll gladly do my best to get all the details in.

Credits

Main Authors

• Author: Thompson Lee
• Co-Author: wedr

Contributors

• solidfox
• d3xor
• gehn
• rindolf
• nitrix
• vendu
• niggler
• WinterMute
• ScrisM
• fincs
• yellows8
• smea

Github Contributors

• nickrolfe
• gogoprog (Issue #13)

Reddit Contributors

• PcChip
• SkyrimForSwitch
• silwr

Other contributors

• Martijn Steinrucken
• The ##programming Freenode IRC channel
• The ##javascript Freenode IRC channel
• The ##opengl Freenode IRC channel
• The Khronos Group
• Stack Overflow
• Microsoft
• Google
• MSDN Community
• MSDN Docs
• Reddit

MIT Licensed.