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the big nerd ranch openGL bootcamp is a 5 day intensive training in openGL. the lessons go from rendering coloured squares on a black background through to 3D, fog, transparency, lighting, basic animation, mouse interaction, vertex shaders, etc. apparently, it is the only non university-affiliated openGL class like this.
the setting is completely awesome. you're not in some stale, sterile hotel where you never go outside. you're taken straight from the airport by BNR staff to a ranch outside of atlanta, where you spend the next 5 days living in luxury-- 3 meals a day prepared and served (they even dealt with my vegan-ness pretty well!), and private room with huge top of the line beds. But it's not just the quality of the room and biard that i like, which was wonderful, but that fact that this was an immersion experience. all classmates (unless you're from town) stay at the ranch, so you also eat with these people and, those who are interested, spend the evenings geeking out together in the classroom. we were welcomed to stay late into the night, and the instructor, Rocco, stayed with us, answered questions, reviewed material, and went like 3D modeling programs.
but back to the meat of things. this is a survey course, but a good one. although i went home feeling like there were gaps to fill in before i could implement all the material we covered, i also went home feeling like i knew HOW to fill in those gaps, by reading the documentation, the openGL red book, and the course notes.
you should know that the course doesn't cover windowing systems, or 3d modeling programs. it is quite Mac focused. although all the core openGL skills you learn can obviously be used on other platforms, there's quite a bit of 'under the hood' code used in many of the examples which are cocoa-specific. the main impact of this is that you have to do a bit of work (depending on the example) if you wanted to port the exercises to linux or windows. but again, the core skills are of course cross platform. We also informally covered installation and setup on Linux and Windows in an evening session.
You are given a computer with Mac and/or Mac and Linux on it. Windowing, as mentioned above, is all done with Cocoa. Rocci did give us a generic glut wrapper that helps get the basic exercises functional on other platforms, and that i used to get more sophisticated examples running too. Lessons are taught in 10-20 minute lectures, and then right after the lecture there is a lab session where you implement the topic just covered. Each lesson has a 'bonus' in case you get the main exercise running in time.
The material was good even for a total beginner. It's hard to develop a course that both challenges people with some experience, but doesn't lose the noobs. this course did that well. someone else made the suggestion that the exercises we were given to apply the lessons have 2 incarnations-- one advanced and one beginner level. i think this would be ideal, but realize this would be a lot of work for the instructor.
Now that I've been back a few weeks and have been playing around and applying the stuff we learned, in retrospect I would have really benefited from 2 additional lectures. One that went into more detail on the high level structure of OpenGL, and one on the basics of a cross-platform windowing system like GLUT.
Overall, though, this was an awesome experience and exactly how i think this kind of thing should be implemented: in an immersive setting, away from the constraints and distractions of regular lives, and with the nitty gritty details taken care of for you.
visit the Big Nerd Ranch website for current class offerings and schedules. The openGL bootcamp is described here.
- Jessy Cowan-Sharpwww.flickr.com
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