The CG Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics

As the owner of a game company, books like this are a valuable asset in getting our developers who aren't familiar with CG up to speed on the subject. This book is highly recommended by our development staff, and our developers went out an purchased their own personal copies of the book even though we have it in our office library.

I couldn't put this book down. Its the only Cg book out there as of now, and its written by the minds at nVidia; the creators of Cg. It does a fantastic job of explaining the language and the all-important vertex/fragment concepts in a good amount of detail. There are also many example effects featured in the book that you can try out yourself and see in action(providing you have the appropriate hardware support).

This book provides a solid introduction to Cg which is identical to microsoft's HLSL except that the compiler and runtime interface support both OpenGL and DirectX profiles. Chapters 7 and 8 on environment mapping and bump are very good and really cleared up the mysteries of tangent space and normalization cube maps for me. Chapter 9 is a bit sparse and tries to cover too much with not enough detail (Fog,Projective Texture Mapping, Shadow Maps and Composition of layers) in my opinion. Still an excellent book and seeing the picture of virtual Dawn and the possiblities that were once only available to Hollywood and Pixars Renderman is really inspiring.

Traditional graphics textbooks did not contain programmable real-time shading techniques. This book is a good example to fill in this gap. In my opinion, university can start a new course teaching programmable real-time shading....

This is an excellent book for the beginning or advanced Cg and Graphics programmer. This book not only does and excellent job of explaining the insides of Cg but also of laying out the math behind what's going on with the effects.A must have.