Computer graphics

What Hacker News says

1. deepaksurtiOct 2018
   Computer Graphics:

   [1a, 1b, 1c] Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice Series [2] Physically Based Rendering [3] Real Time Rendering

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   [1a] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-Principles-James-Fo... [1b] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-Principles-Practice... [1c] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-Principles-Practice... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Physically-Based-Rendering-Theory-Imp... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Rendering-Third-Tomas-Akeni...

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2. philipkglassMay 2024
   I bought The Art and Science of Digital Compositing at Powell's Technical Books in Portland a year before I started my capstone project. It and Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice 2nd Edition in C were my main references.

   There was much less open source code to look at back then, and it wasn't as easily searchable either. Working on graphics, I could usually (though not always) resolve an ambiguous directive by trying different approaches and looking at the output. Does the result look like colored snow? Does the whole image now have a magenta tint? I probably need to try a different interpretation (or just fix my bug).

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3. georgecmuDec 2021
   There are a lot of book recommendations, but I would not focus on books if I wanted to get the equivalent of a solid CS education. Instead I would work through university lecture slides, assignments, and exams -- basically fast forward through a CS undergrad leveraging what you already know.

   I'm partial to CMU's CS syllabus for obvious reasons, but I find that it's also one of the most open and available resources on the web; i.e. not locked in on an intranet, etc.

   With pre-existing background in software development the basic syllabus is more than doable in a 3-4 months. There are two sequences below: programming and theoretical fundamentals; you can do them in parallel.

   Programming:

   15-211: Introduction to Data Structures. Used to be in C++; now looks like it's in Java. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjs/121/lectures.html

   15-212: Principles of Programming. Still in ML. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~me/212/schedule.html | https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/96-212/ (unlocked assignment pages)

   15-213: Intro to Computer Systems. I hesitate to recommend this; 90% of the value in this course is in the labs and assignments, so it's difficult to do on one's own, but I would at least go through the slides and try to work through exams. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/schedule.html

   Theoretical:

   15-251: Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science. Used to be Discrete Math with a heavy CS lean; it may have evolved. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15251/schedule.html

   15-451: Algorithms. Here's a decade worth of lectures, exams and assignments - take your pick: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15451/ The 2013 course looks pretty complete: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15451-f...

   Next steps:

   Since you are interested in VR, etc, you should probably look into the Computer Graphics courses. Note that the undergrad and grad courses are combined; the only difference is the expectations:

   15-462: Computer Graphics http://15462.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2020/ Exam problems and solutions are gold: http://15462.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2020content/exams/finals...

   15-463: Computational Photography http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15-463/

   15-464: Technical Animation http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/nsp/course/15464-s21/www/syllabus... http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/nsp/course/15464-s21/www/assignme...

   Hope this helps. Good luck!

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4. gitgudJun 2020
   The best courses I took in Computer Science (3 years ago) were:

   - Computer Systems: Building a computer system from scratch (virtually) logic gates to applications https://www.nand2tetris.org/book

   - Computer Networks and Applications: An overview of network protocols and layers, basically how the internet works.

   - Event-Driven Computing: How to make GUI's, state-machines, event-driven systems are used everywhere.

   - Computer Graphics: Understanding how graphics pipelines and OpenGL shaders work. Building a game from scratch in C.

   They might not be interesting to everyone, but I felt these were the most fun and practical in learning how computers work and how to build software.

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