I’ve updated the graphics books listing hosted at our site. This is excruciatingly dull HTML editing; I hope it helps you out. Many of the additions are from CRC, since I was able to view their books at SIGGRAPH – the number of book vendors seemed way down this year, maybe two total? If you find (or wrote!) a relevant book that’s not listed, let me know.

The secret takeaway on our webpage: check the additional links I give at the end of most listings. Many books have some sort of free preview and a related website with code, lecture notes, etc. For example, Multithreading for Visual Effects has a website that includes the SIGGRAPH 2013 course notes that the book is based on.

I like that the new book Introduction to Computer Graphics: A Practical Learning Approach has an associated website named http://www.envymycarbook.com/, chosen because the book’s overarching project is developing a race driving game. Calling their book Envy My Car would have been wonderfully foolish. I guess this is a reason why we still have publishers.

There are also other interesting resources you can find tucked away in these websites, such as this list of on-line articles related to Game Engine Architecture. A bunch of the URLs listed there are easily-discovered wikipedia links, but quite a few are solid blog entries or other web pages you might not find in a quick search. This sort of editorial grooming of web resources is valuable. The 2nd edition’s list of URLs is not up yet, and I can understand why. Please don’t remind me how dated a fair bit of our own main page has become – managing links is a giant time suck, so I appreciate it whenever anyone else makes this sort of effort.

Dig deep enough on some of these book websites and you might find oddities such as this list of ten reasons to write a computer graphics textbook. I guess we’re in the bastard category?

I did do some back-filling, adding older books that could (someday) be relevant to interactive rendering, e.g., Production Volume Rendering. I didn’t add all possible vaguely-related books. From the cover and title, The Magic of Computer Graphics looks like a coffee-table book, pretty pictures and minimal content. Looking inside, it turns out to be a heavy-duty text on materials and illumination theory. For example, by page 11 you’re exposed to an integral for the BRDF, and that’s the ninth equation introduced by then. I left it out mostly because it’s an odd duck. The book Visual Perception from a Computer Graphics Perspective looks like a good volume if you’re really really into perception, but not all that related to interactive 3D graphics. I was also tempted by Digital Geometry in Image Processing, mostly because of the cover – I’m in solidarity with anyone who voxelizes teapots. This book sounds like computer graphics, but instead turns out to give a glimpse at how huge the world is. There’s a whole area of study of the theory of measurement for pixel and voxel centered coordinates? Wow. But it doesn’t look all that relevant. Feel free to read it and prove me wrong, that would be great.

No book reviews for now, as I haven’t seriously examined the newer books yet. I’ve asked for a (very) few review copies, and hope to cover these in the upcoming months. There is one book I know I won’t review (and won’t list), this alternate-universe version of Real-Time Rendering, accidentally issued by CRC Press without the realization that they already had a book with this title. An embarrassment for them, so I feel a little rude to mention it, but honestly… It was on display at the CRC booth, but not next to their “other” Real-Time Rendering, which would have made a good photo.

Luckily CRC can’t sue itself for passing off and unfair competition. It’s an interesting area of the law – titles are not copyright; trademark applies to only a series of books (e.g. “… for Dummies”). Searching on Introduction to Computer Graphics will turn up about four books, including the new one from CRC. This is fair, since the title is pretty generic and none of the books has established itself as the well-known one. I look forward to someone testing the waters in the future and publishing Physically Based Rendering: From Hog to Lard.