NeHe and as any other tutorial site never gets to the point in my opinion. Just another sample application completely focused on doing what the tutorial is intended to teach. In the end, sure it was nice to learn how to do that single effect, but being able to design a whole flow chart in order to design and implement a complete engine with a complex scengraph, exporter plugins and how to manage your rendering queue is something that i've never seen anything about.

All those books about writing a 3d engine is a totally waste of money in my experience, the only things those books contains is:
2/5 How you draw your triangle using their screwed up wrapping system
1/5 Some math
1/5 Lighting and texturing that triangle
1/5 Their hardcoded game that's using a crappy heightmap and moves a couple of models around with hardcoded logic as to how things should work and interact with each other.

Where's the tutorials and articles concerning what you realy need to learn?! If i see another triangle or heightmap tutorial i'm going to throw up, seriously...

Write articles on advanced scenegraphs such as the node tree in 3dsmax and how the matrices translation is inherited downwards through the scenegraph or maybe that was just a feature we added, can't remember. Talk about extracting geometry, sorting it, how to optimize texture management over more than one mesh. Let's talk about writing a complex rendering queue pipeline with full shader support, no one uses the fixed function pipeline any more.

How about some advanced tutorials people?! And how about getting to see em with the full picture instead of a god damn sample framework with specialized code just to make it run.

I'm hoping my point is getting through. The problem with programming is never learning syntax or how the code works, that's the easy part. The hard part is knowing what systems you need to design and program in order to fullfill a certain purpose... hell, just finding out about the singleton design is a mayor leap forward for anyone that never even knew it existed.

Resource pools, rendering queues with sorting, different types of scenegraphs, how to integrate a physics engine into a scenegraph, that alone requires a completely new way of thinking, smart and easy texturing techniques like splatting and tons more... Hell they're not hard, but finding out that they even exist is!

Oh and sorry asafpolt, never intended to insult you.

Just found this link
http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/9078/Modern-Graphics-Engine-Design.pdf
don't know how informative that pdf is, i haven't read it but i'm going to check out what it says, can't hurt.

Id definatly recomend taking a trig class unless you allready understand the trigometric functions. Besides that, look at any calculus book and you will see most of what you need + alot of extra crap. At the school im in it goes

Algebra
Trig
PreCal -> Im here
Calc1,2,3
Differential equations
Matrix theory

The most useful was definatly trig, althought i consider it pretty simple now, you wont get far without it. Notice im also only at precal so i might not know what im talking about !!

As i said earlier, knowing the math is great, but don't overdo it. Knowing how certain trig/algebraic functions work is great when programming how objects interact and move around and such... But in the end it's a small part of the 3d engine considering all that needs to be designed and programmed. (And seriously, if you're going to write "your own math lib" let me know, so i can come over and put you out of your missery. I can't stress how important the statement - don't reinvent the wheel - is in this buisiness.)