A thorough coverage of the Computer Graphics world.
I have found this book to be _the_ most useful book in my line of work yet. I have been involved in computer graphics and software development for about 10 years, and this stands out as the ideal reference book.Dont bother with this book if you just want source code. This book is all about explanation of the fundamentals of computer graphics. It is excellent in helping with design descisions and implementation strategies. Dont overlook this book if you are in anyway involved with the creation of a computer graphics application. The theory and algorithms described are old, but these are still used today - interestingly other reviewers seem to think this is bad, its not. It saves you spending months researching a method only to find it was already mentioned in this book, and the benefits and disadvantages are often written well with solid references.
In my opinion, in Computer Graphics, this is the Bible. The theories and algorithms assist in solving any problem you will find in the computer graphics world. It wont give you the code, but it will give you a solution.
Good book for 3D graphics
It is a book for the ones who like math, not for general programmers.
Once the standard text, now badly out of date
Once upon a time any student interested in computer graphics was referred straight to this book, and indeed what you've got here is an amazing smorgasbord of nearly every technique that was state of the art several years ago. Unfortunately the times have moved on and Foley et al. have not quite been able to keep up with them; entire chapters are still devoted to PHIGS, while modern methods of rotation such as quaternions are covered in only the most cursory way.Another problem is the book's extremely terse, high-level approach to many important concepts; often a mathematical approach or an algorithm will be mentioned as a solution to a given problem (quadtrees, let's say), but once you try to take that knowledge from the chalkboard to the compiler, you begin to realize that there are some important pieces missing. Of course, no one expects a text like this to be a cookbook of code snippets, but as a primary textbook for an applications programmer this falls short. The tiny print and unhelpful illustrations don't improve matters much for pedagogy.
So, even though this is the Classic Textbook, I've found myself better served by a combination of other, more recent books -- Alan Watt's text on graphics in combination with Eric Lengyel's on 3D Mathematics, specifically. They won't cover *everything* there is to know, but they'll do a better job of getting you started than Foley, and the stuff they don't address can be found in other books or SIGGRAPH papers.
Too much info in too little space
This book mentions almost every concept useful in computer graphics. This is actually where the book fails. There are so many concepts, it can't cover all of them adequately. Things like rendering primitives, scanline conversion, and shadows are explained in detail while other concepts like quaternion interpolation, environmental mapping, and image filtering are barely summarized. The choice of SPHIGS as the language of examples is also questionable at best.
The most broadly useful graphics book in existence.
This book will acquaint you with nearly every graphic technique and algorithm. It's THE book to have if you expect to be involved in more than a narrow range of graphics programming. If your ambition is limited to writing a Quake-like engine, you'll find yourself mouthing silliness like "it covers too many topics, many of which are trivial and unimportant such as the coverage of 2D graphics." This book does not hold your hand; the algorithms are explained thoroughly but you are expected to write your own code. If you're looking for off-the-shelf solutions or a way to cheat on your homework, this isn't your book.
I've owned this book for nearly ten years and have turned to it time and again when taking on new tasks related to graphics - color space conversions, lighting algorithms in 3D, dithering, 2D primitive rendering for print graphics, and many more... it's the best value I've ever gotten in a computer-related book.
(41 reviews)
