Pro OGRE 3D Programming is your detailed guide to utilizing the OGRE 3D engine, one of the best-in-breed 3D rendering libraries available. You’ll learn what OGRE is, and more importantly, what it is not. OGRE gives you an object-oriented interface to render 3D scenes independent of the implementation, such as Direct3D or OpenGL. OGRE is available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It can be utilized to create a variety of 3D-based applications and is commonly used in game creation.

This book covers OGRE from obtaining the source to polishing the final product. If you are an aspiring game programmer with beginner/intermediate-level knowledge of game design practices and intermediate-level knowledge of the C++ language, this is the book for you. Familiarity with open source project management tools such as CVS and Subversion will also help you to digest the material. Included with the book is a ready-to-use Utility Toolkit class library useful for jumpstarting OGRE-based programs. You’ll also find discussion of OGRE’s capabilities from the perspective of a content creator, not just a programmer.

The content of this book was reviewed prior to publication by Steve Streeting, founder and lead developer of the OGRE 3D project.

Pro OGRE 3D Programming is your detailed guide to utilizing the OGRE 3D engine. You’ll learn what OGRE is, and more importantly, what it is not. OGRE gives you an object-oriented interface to render 3D scenes independent of the implementation such as Direct3D or OpenGL. OGRE is available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It can be utilized to create a variety of 3D-based applications and is commonly used in game creation.

If you are an aspiring game programmer with beginner/intermediate-level knowledge of game design practices and intermediate-level knowledge of the C++ language, this is the book for you. Familiarity with open source project management tools such as CVS and Subversion will also help you to digest the material. You’ll want to pick up a copy of this book because it

    Includes a ready-to-use Utility Toolkit class library useful for jumpstarting OGRE-based programs
    Covers OGRE in its entirety, from obtaining the source to polishing the final product
    Is the most comprehensive volume on the best-in-breed 3D rendering library
    Includes a discussion of OGRE’S capability from the perspective of the content creator

Almost best buy for novice 3D programmers

This book gives a full coverage of OGRE 3D features... perfect tutorials especially for postprocessing

The only disadvantage is that you need a good amount of freetime to read and test all techniques.

Just the right amount

The book presents all the crucial information in a very organized manner. I found the presentation to be concise and easy to read.

Warning: The book does not teach you how to make a game, It explains the core api functions of OGRE and some background behind them. This should give you a good start to utilize the 3d rendering capability offered by OGRE. You need another book or a course in game design before you can really start making non-trivial games.

Pro OGRE 3D Programming (Pro)

This book was a well written , easily and objective. The goal of this book is to describe who to use Ogre 3D framework and you main functionality. I only would recommend this book for advanced developers .

How could this have been published?

Spending all day reading and implementing obscure APIs, you tend to develop thick skin for badly written documentation. Programmers generally don’t have english degrees. You suffer through and glean the information you need to get your job done.

I’ll cut to the chase on this review. This book contains NO information. That’s right, it tells you nothing about how to use Ogre. The author spends the first quarter of the book on downloading, installing, and calling the init function (which takes up to three arguments).

Halfway through the book I started thinking "He’s actually going to put and object in a scene any minute now". Nope, it never happens. After spending a hundred pages talking about how great Ogre is and the four types of objects he skips over actually using any of the objects. The book doesn’t even cover the object trees. It flops back and forth between halfway done remedial 3D concepts (What is a camera? I’ll tell you in chapter 7) and marketing speek (Ogre has a great plugin archtitecture you should love only I won’t tell you how to use it).

I’m still in awe that something this free of actual content could be published. After reading the entire book, I still had no idea how to perform basic functions in Ogre like loading a texture.

This book has no audience. It doesn’t really cover any basic 3D concepts so it’s bad for beginners. It doesn’t cover how to use the APIs so it’s bad for a bootstrap reference, and it doesn’t cover any core logic so it’s bad for advanced developers. No one should ever buy this book.

Skip this book.

While this text represents what amounts to a noble effort on behalf of the author and the Ogre community, I’m afraid that the best I can say for this book is that it’s not entirely terrible. Hoping to fast-forward past the traditionally hackish explanations offered by online documentation, I had purchased this book expecting to learn about Ogre in a more carefully structured and comprehensive (not to mention, professional) manner. Unfortunately, this was simply not to be.

The examples in this book... suck. They’re terrible. Everything is simply copied (often incorrectly!) from the freely available Ogre samples. What’s more, any explanation of this code is purely cursory, often suggesting that the reader "Check the website for more details," which are apparently too involved or lengthy for inclusion in this $35 hardcover text on Ogre. Oops.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the OpenGL programming guide. For one reason or another, I’ve come to expect concise examples that illustrate a single idea presented with plenty of discussion on how this idea might be used in practice and some exposition as to what features exist to allow one to best do so. Compared to this expectation, what this book manages to give you is a tiny sampling of a semi-relevant example drawn from the SDK’s sample projects, partnered with the name of the classes and member functions involved in said example all laid out in a nice monospace font, and that’s about the sum of it (give or take one or two sentences of description-- sometimes). For instance, while one whole page is dedicated to a laundry-list of the Camera’s member functions (clearly copied wholesale from the header file with minimal corrections), maybe three or four functions for interacting with the scene graph are *shown* (not presented) in the context of-- you guessed it-- a small subset of some Ogre sample project. This and some sample code showing how to query the scene in one or two ways is basically all you get from the ~30 page chapter dedicated to the subject.

Often times, the author spends pages upon pages singing praise to a particular feature of Ogre (render queues, techniques, LOD, schemes...), proceeding thereupon to omit any sort of actual explanation of how this feature is used later in the text. As you might imagine, this habit becomes quite annoying by the third or fourth time it occurs. Worse, still, is that any discussion that *is* presented by the author often culminates in a lacking, vague, and ambiguous description that ultimately fails to convey any sense of "The Big Picture." For one reason or another, the author seems convinced that a six line code snippet from the SDK is sufficient to explain just about everything there is to know about, say, Materials or SceneManager instances. And in the end, you feel *almost* as inexperienced with this library as you did when you originally set out to learn Ogre. Of course, by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll also have learned the valuable lesson that the website is really quite good-- but I’d bet that’s not exactly the lesson you were planning to take from this book when you plunked down your money for it in the first place.

One final criticism: be warned! When this book first arrived, I was quite surprised to discover just how thin it was. Before you assume that it’s because this book is concise and to-the-point also note that the print is TINY. It’s a real pain that the publisher decided to cut corners and use a 10 point font to cut down on page count all the while selling this text as a clunky hardcover book! This, coupled with the numerous typos, bugs, and inconsistencies make for a very unprofessional read. If this were a freely available tutorial you could find somewhere on the website, I’d give it 4 stars. But this is a pricey, hardcover book that’s supposed to be professionally edited, organized, and polished; hence, it gets 2 stars.

Okay, okay. This book isn’t entirely bad. It’s always nice when an open source project becomes big enough to warrant a book. And I’m sure that the author had fine intentions when setting out to write this text: some of the chapters do manage a decent description of their subject matter, and the author’s enthusiasm for Ogre is quite evident in his writing (which can be amusing, at times). Unfortunately, however, this book is just not there yet: it is a thorough sales pitch, a high-level tutorial, and many suggestions to visit the website; expect nothing more.

My suggestion? Take his advice, and save some money. Visit the website and skip this book.

It can be improved

It was a good start for Ogre and really fill some blanks from the tutorial. I thought it would be covering more intermediate and advanced aspects and features of Ogre.
Ogre is such a wonderful engine and it needs a "Ogre’s Bible" title.

Una tecnica de programacion eficaz y productiva.

Magnifica herramienta de trabajo para adentrarse en los entresijos del motor grafico OGRE. Paralelo al uso de OGRE, se aprenden modernas técnicas de programación en C++ que se salen de los habituales niveles de iniciación-medio al que estamos acostumbrados.

For those who want to begin with ogre

Good introduction into ogre, but could be improved.

Solid introduction to Ogre3D for developers and artists

Soon after selecting Ogre3D for use at work, we were happy to see this book became available. Sure, the Ogre website had enough information to get you going, but this book helped to fill in some blanks and it has some really nice sections detailing the architecture of the engine before diving into different aspects of Ogre.

The book has some good tidbits and tips along the way to help you make the most of Ogre and avoid pitfalls. The author has an excellent writing style that makes this title easy to consume.

The book is a good reference if you are developing with Ogre and we have found it to be a good way for new artists in the team to learn about Ogre functionality that they will need to use daily such as the particle system and material scripting.

I highly recommend it for anyone starting with Ogre. Despite the information available on the Ogre website, this book adds value to me as a 3d software developer.

why use Ogre in the first place?

As far as I can tell, the book assumes some previous knowledge of 3D graphics. It is not about the algorithms of that subject. [If you are interested in algorithms, see Shirley’s "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics" or the book by Foley and van Dam.] Instead, it shows how to do simple graphics using Ogre.

A substantial part of the book is also about the mechanics of downloading and installing Orge, and then how to get started running it, with easy examples. So we see how to use light sources in our 3D world, for instance. One nice feature of Ogre is how it can do photorealistic rendering. Once, this was the stuff of research papers. Now, you get the capability for free, out of the Ogre box.

The biggest puzzle to me about Orge is a basic one. Why would you invest your time learning and programming it? Instead, why not just use OpenGL? The book is really preaching to the choir, by assuming that if you get it, you are already committed to Ogre. Sure, Ogre probably has some unique features that OpenGL does not currently have. But if these are compelling enough, someone will soon add them to OpenGL. And OpenGL is far more heavily used. Just in terms of your own job prospects, the numerous jobs using OpenGL might outweigh any nice uniqueness of Ogre.

Look, if you are already experienced in Orge, then you have invested a lot of time and thus perhaps you should continue using it. If so, you don’t need this book, so why are you reading this review? But if you are considering going into Ogre, think about some alternatives.

good but mishes on examples

I liked a lot this book, a lot of my questions that I had with Ogre it ansered to me. But I miss sometimes some example code to made the subject clear.

Pretty Good

I found the book to be generally good. It was unable to cover many aspects of OGRE thoroughly, but that’s only to be expected, since it’s aimed at the beginner. I find it to be a good reference to look back at occasionally. One thing I noticed was that it would have been very hard for a beginner to pick up and construct a project without the use of the OGRE wiki tutorials, therefore I believe a more fitting title would have the word "reference" somewhere in it. I can say that this was a pretty decent way to lead off any books to be published which cover OGRE. A special thanks to Gregory Junker for writing this book. It did as intended; I learned from it.

Splendid book introduction for a great 3d engine

I met Ogre some months ago when I was reviewing several 3d engines for a project we were starting at work. After chosing it for it’s several features and characteristics, my main source of information and knowledge was their great API documentation, forums and wiki.

Although most of the things I needed to know could be found at those sources, there was always something missing.

I find that in Pro OGRE 3d Programming. After knowing there was going to be a book about Ogre, I preordered it ASAP. Some months later, it finally came out, and arrive at my door.

The book in simply excellent. The author ("xavier" as it called in the Ogre forums) will lead you from the basics of Ogre, it’s architecture, philosophy and main concepts to the more high-level themes (althogh probably not enough for powerusers, it’s a really good offer for starters and veterans who want to consolidate their knowledge -a second part would be even great I hope... *wink* *wink*) like the Compositor, Render to Texture, etc.

Overall, a very interesting (and much needed) book.

A very solid, well-written intro to Ogre

I definitely recommend this book if you want to learn about the Ogre3D library. Gregory Junker’s clear and personal writing style makes for a very readable book, and most of Ogre’s important features are covered.

I gave it four stars instead of five because the book lacks some things such as a CD, and a list of Ogre’s datatypes. A larger font would be nicer, and the book could be longer. These are decisions which were made by the publisher, and do not refect on the author.

All in all, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with Ogre, or just get some insight into what makes a great 3D gaming/application engine.


-j

Useless

With its hundreds of classes, Ogre 3D might seem at first like a complicated, gigantic framework but its design is fairly simple once you understand the basic concepts.

Seriously, if you take 20 minutes to read the little HTML manual that comes with the SDK (also available on the website) and look at the examples for another 15 minutes, you will have covered MOST of the content of this book. With its 200ish pages, I went through it in about 45 minutes.

Also, the vast majority of the code and the screenshots in the books are taken right from the SDK samples. There is almost no original content so dont expect to get CD.

In conclusion, this book does not bring any new information that is not easily available in the manual, SDK samples and documentation. With such a simple design, I dont think there is a need for a book about Ogre right now. I give it 2 stars because I liked the fact that it really focuses on the Ogre API : the author does not try to teach C++ or 3D programming.

Great Book!

The book is very good. It is definitely aimed at a newcomer to Ogre, but it can be useful even for people who have been around Ogre for a while as they might be missing a few concepts or not be familiar with a few components that they might not have used before.

The book describes the Ogre concepts and major components. It gives you an in-depth look at each of the components and their concepts without holding your hand and without being bogged down by an API.

The book writing is clear and concise. It gets to the point without feeling dry. The code snippets are well choosen and provide complete and clear examples that are related to the text that comes beforehand and afterwards.

Personally, I thought the two best sections were Chapter 6: Ogre Materials, and Chapter 11: Dynamic Shadows. People new to Ogre will love chapters 1 through 4 as it will give them an easy way to set up and understand Ogre.

Great technical writing + Great coverage of the concepts and details about each of the Ogre components + sticking to the subject of Ogre and not steering off into teaching shaders or C++ makes this a must buy for the people new to Ogre and a definite consideration for the veterans

Great for Beginner and Intermediate Ogre users

This book guides you through getting Ogre set up on Windows and Linux as well giving you a very firm base of knowledge of the engine. This book is definately aimed at new users, but I have been using Ogre for over a year and still found this book to be helpful and enjoyable. The author does a great job of giving clear explainations and examples! Overall a wonder book!