We'll start by stating that we thing that this book is mis-labeled - the design elements contained herein are hardly 3D Globe specific, and their utility can hardly be overstated. What the authors actually do is build a very nice, modern, OpenGL rendering engine. The fact that it's good at rendering ellipsoids is secondary, we dare say. In terms of featureset, it's fully OpenGL 3.3 capable, going as far as to even employ the oft forgotten art of Geometry Shaders (many "thanks" G80 for killing that rather useful rendering pipeline stage). This would place it roughly at DX10 level, with a small cherry being placed on top in terms of discussing the recently introduced tessellation stages. Note that whilst the engine uses GL, the book doesn't shy away from discussing the equivalent DirectX 11 implementation in many spots, which is rather excellent in our humble opinion.

Opposed to the prior text, the work of Mr. Cozzi and Mr. Ring is filled with code, be it in C# or GLSL form. Yes, followers of the true programming language religion(s), C# was the weapon of choice for the authors, so you can implement a bi-directional hate algorithm, hitting both the "Oh, noes, C++-ism" and the "Oh, noes, managed" angles! All joking aside, the code content is quite digestible and easy to follow, and we can imagine eager readers swarming the book's website in order do download the entire codebase.

Asides from the very usable 3D engine provided, one can also find oodles of interesting discussions on how to solve Depth Buffer precision related problems, how to deal with the limited coordinate precision afforded by the float representation (albeit we admit to not being overly fond of the "use doubles" proposition). It's also amusing to see the chapters dealing with the challenges of rendering massive datasets at realtime rates, in the context of the "novel" Megatexturing approach that's more or less making the rounds. Finally, we must issue bonus points for dealing with multi-threading head on, rather than as an afterthought, especially since the queuing mechanism proposed is reasonable and easy to implement. We'd also recommend that one should play with all the "Try this" challenges in the book, they're good fun...if 3D rendering is your cup of tea.

We're quite appreciative of the physical representation, with hardcovers and full color pages being on the menu and the provided references are recent and good. All in all, we'd say that both the beginner and the more experienced practitioner has something in store hidden between the black covers.

In closing, we would very much like to thank Ms. Michelle Smith for reaching out to us and sending us some brain food to chew on.