The standard text in computer graphics courses (sometimes abbreviated to CG:PP). Written by James D. Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes. It's an excellent reference book; must-own for anyone doing serious computer graphics. It covers all the basic principles, from pixels and 2D transformations throught to radiosity and ray-tracing and beyond. It's got nice colour sections as well, with beautiful images. And it's over 1100 pages.

It covers just about everything, but not in a great level of depth. It's also incredibly dense, in the sense that it's not light reading. You might have to read things a few times before understanding them.

The current edition is the second, although there are two variants, the later one (1995) with all examples being in C.

It's starting to show its age a bit. For example, it uses SPHIGS for its 3D graphics examples, a system which most people haven't even heard of, when today most people would recommend the 3D examples all be done in OpenGL. But it's still very, very good.

There is also a "cut-down" version of the same text, called "Introduction to Computer Graphics" (hell, most of the diagrams are out of CG:PP!), which skips some of the more advanced topic areas.

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