I am very Interested in learning to program 3D graphics and I have tried both D3D and OpenGL and I found OpenGL to be the most agreeable of both the APIs. Because of this I have decided that I am going to buy the OpenGL Library book set which contains the OpenGL Programming Guide and the OpenGL Shading Language guide. I do not currently know a lot about 3D programming but from what I have read I have become aware that shaders are rapidly becoming the way to go when carrying out 3D graphic programming. So my question is this, would it be a reasonable decision to try to go straight into learning GLSL and using the red book as a reference if I need to know something about OpenGL which isn't covered in the orange book,or would it be better to learn fixed function methods first and then trying to tackle GLSL? Thanks in advance for your advice.

Well when OpenGL 3 comes out with drivers. The Fixed Function Format will be removed competely(depecated). So after 3.0 you have no choice but to use Shaders only just like OpenGL ES 2.0 which is shaders only. So you choice of Cg/FX or GLSL

Quote:Original post by OrangyTang
The only real reason to use the fixed fuction pipeline these days is to support legacy hardware that can't do shaders - mostly older laptops these days. If that's not an issue then by all means start straight away with shaders, in many cases they actually simplify things since you can see exactly what's going on.

Quote:Original post by xZekex
Well when OpenGL 3 comes out with drivers. The Fixed Function Format will be removed competely(depecated). So after 3.0 you have no choice but to use Shaders only just like OpenGL ES 2.0 which is shaders only. So you choice of Cg/FX or GLSL

Deprecated is not the same as "removed completely". The functionality still exists, but it's marked for removal in the future and it's advised that you avoid using it.

Yeah i typed it wrong :\

Ok thanks for the info guys, I guess I will dive straight in to shaders then =D