Hello. While NeHe has in the past been an excellent resource for getting started with OpenGL, this has not been the case in the current shader-based era. Programmers weaned on fixed-function often have very difficult times coming to understand how things work with shaders. And with OpenGL 3.1 removing much of the functionality that the NeHe tutorials depend on, I felt that a void needed to be filled.

My attempt to fill this void are available on my website, and the source code download is also available. It's fairly lengthy, though unfinished.

I'm interested in commentary and criticism of my tutorials. The content, the source code, whatever. I get a lot of "Oh that's great" or the occasional bug report correcting a typo or some such. But I don't get any real, in-depth criticism from someone who actually knows this stuff, or to have a dialog with someone who's knew that doesn't really know what's going on. I'm mostly interested in whether I've explained concepts properly so that new users will understand them effectively. I also want to know whether I have missed some valuable concept in a tutorial. Or even just a debate about whether you think it was appropriate to wait until Tutorial 14 to start on textures (the reasoning is actually explained).

Before you start however, know this: my tutorial series is not complete. I know that I've barely scratched the surface of texturing; I've still got two more texture-focused tutorials planned (one that covers projective texturing, textures as lightsources, and cubemaps. And one that covers bumpmapping in various forms). I'm also well aware that blending and render-targets have not been touched yet. Again, those are planned for the future. So this isn't necessarily about what large features are missing, so much as how I can improve upon the structure I have designed. Or even commentary on whether you think that the structure is effective for teaching new programmers.

Looks interesting, I've been searching for a good tutorial on shaders. The only thing I can note right now is that NeHe has a much gentler colour scheme.

Thanks for the commentary. Can you elaborate a bit on your issue with the color-scheme? Is it simply that it isn't "dark background on light-text", or is there something else?

I've done a fair number of NeHe's tutorials way back when, and having remained purely in 2D in more recent times; I am somewhat of a 3D newbie. Your tutorials look interesting, and I hope to go through them soon. I can give you my opinion of them from a beginner's perspective.

Just a question though: I notice there were some lua files under Tutorial 1. What are they used for? I've never used lua files before and have little knowledge about them.

Thanks for the effort - myself and surely others in the community appreciate it

Those Lua files are part of the build system. It's all outlined in the documentation for how to build.

These tutorials focus more on the textual explanation. I generally don't expect people to download the distro and just read through the source code without looking at the detailed documentation.