NAME
books - Books Related to Open Inventor / Coin Here is a list of some of
the better books for people that invested in software development with
Open Inventor. If you have suggestions for additional books that ought
to go on this list, please feel free to tell us about it.
The Inventor Mentor
(subtitle ’Programming Object-Oriented 3D Graphics with Open Inventor’)
This is an excellently written, detailed, tutorial-style introductory
book for Open Inventor that takes you through all the fundamental
design principles applied in the Open Inventor API, richly illustrated
and with numerous, well documented code examples.
The Inventor Mentor is getting a bit old, but do not let that put you
off. It is as valid today as it was the day it was written, and we
heartily recommend this book for anyone learning to use Open Inventor.
ISBN 0-201-62495-8. You might also be able to find this book as a pdf
file online, but we recommend having it in print.
The Inventor Toolmaker
This book explains how Open Inventor was designed for being extended by
the users, and walks you through how to develop your own components
that work with all aspects of Coin.
ISBN 0-201-62493-1. You might also be able to find this book as a pdf
file online, but we recommend having it in print.
The Annotated VRML2.0 Reference Manual
This book covers the VRML97 (aka VRML 2.0) standard, which Coin has
implemented with its Inventor/VRMLnodes/* classes, which is an
extension made beyond the Open Inventor V2.1 API.
The VRML97 format has some significant differences from the Inventor
and VRML1 formats, so it is a useful book if you want to use that part
of Coin.
ISBN 0-201-41974-2. You will find the specification documents for
VRML97 online at <http://www.web3d.org/>.
The Open GL Programming Manual
This is the bible when it comes to OpenGL programming and is relevant
for Open Inventor extenders that develop new nodes that implement or
affect Open Inventor OpenGL rendering. There are many editions of this
book since it is updated whenever new versions of OpenGL are
standardized and comes out, so check that you have identified the
latest edition if you order one.
The Open Inventor C++ Reference Manual
Although this book is directly relevant for Open Inventor, it does only
cover the Open Inventor 2.1 API. This information is more or less also
covered in the online doxygen doc for Coin, where you have it
hyperlinked, and can also be generated offline from the Coin sources to
have locally, so we do not think this book is very useful to have in
print. We mention it anyway since it is an official documentation book
for Open Inventor.
ISBN 0-201-62491-5.