I have both the superbible 4th and 5th editions. I have to use OpenGL 2.1 for the moment because I am on a mac, however, I am not too keen on the way the Superbible is put together too tutorial like. No doubt in my mind that it is great for a beginner level developer but a little too slow paced for me. I am basically looking for a book that covers OpenGL 2.1 + basic shader programming at a more moderate to quick pace. I like to put practicality to what I am learning for easy experimentation. I really don't want to go though 12 examples of drawing primitives such as points and lines. If all else fails and you guys don't have any better solutions maybe I need to skip around and skim the book. Any advice or direction towards a better suited book?

I really like this book for OpenGL shaders, it's as complete of a reference as you'll need.

http://www.amazon.co...8HB68GJF5PX7ZQ2

Yea my options are probably going to end up having to be the Red Book and Orange Book 2.1 versions. The issue it is almost impossible to get the 2.1 versions of those books now. The 6th edition red book is listed for over $100 on Amazon probably because it is out of print with no kindle edition or anything. So those 2 books may be out of the question which leaves me SOL when it comes to 2.1 unless I use the superbible.

Don't worry about the versions too much, version 3 is really no different than 2 except that a bunch of extensions were promoted to the core, and most of the fixed pipeline stuff was deprecated. You don't really need a "2.1" version of those books, as long as you're using shaders there's little difference between programming for version 3 versus version 2.

Just get the latest red book, you won't have any problems with it.

I understand how fix function was deprecated. In all honesty almost all of 3.0 is supported on mac drivers via extensions minus shader version 1.3 which means I would need to find a way to port the shaders back to 1.2 which may not be possible in a lot of circumstances. If I don't know the differences between shader 1.2 and 1.3 syntax wise it could be quite the task.