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Visualization Graphics in C by Lee Adams Recommended

ISBN: 0-8306-3487-8       Publisher: McGraw-Hill       Pages: 510pp       Price: £18-95.

Categories:   graphics

Reviewed by Ian Ormesher in C Vu 4-4 (May 1992)

There are further icons used to mark pieces of code. This is because a code fragment or an algorithm is sometimes listed which is not complete program in itself.

The two main compilers supported are QuickC 2.00 and Turbo C 2.0 although the could should easily be adapted to other compilers.

The book is split into three main sections and ends with various useful appendices.

The first section deals with the programming skills needed to create visualization software. Starting with basic information about the compilers it goes on to discuss hues, colours, dithering and various other effects. It then goes on to discuss working with images and describes how to save and load PCX format graphics files. This feature alone could make the book a useful buy. Having dealt with animation, mouse, voice and sound programming a whole chapter is dedicated to front-end programming with example programs that include a drop-down menu system shell in graphics mode.

The second section deals with object-based visualisation. This section is a lot more technical and includes 3D modeling and rendering, facet shading, hidden surface elimination, procedural animation using scripts and actors, and kinetic animation. In order to deal with the variety of ways of implementing these, Lee gives an outline of the techniques available and then takes one and expands on it with example code. Where his other books cover a particular topic in more detail he always draws this to our attention.

The third section deals with image-based visualisation. Included here are chapters on image processing, computer vision, morphing and tweening (an animation technique) and cell animation.

The appendices include the complete source code for the toolkit modules together with details of how to interface the programs into third-party graphics libraries such as HALO, GFX, etc..

As you can see from this the book covers a wide area of topics and there should be something of use here for anyone interested in graphics programming. Having read some of the other books by Lee I must confess that my major gripe is that the code is not easily interchangeable between his books. They are obviously written at different times as his appreciation of C improves, and this would seem to have been written last, as the whole issue of portability is addressed. Maybe as these books are being re-issued this situation may have been redressed, but if you already have one of Lee's other books I would examine this one very carefully to see if the extra information you are seeking is contained in it. If you don't have any of Lee's books then I would highly recommend this as a starting point. It will give you a good introduction to graphics programming and can point you in the right direction should you wish to develop this further. As mentioned before, if you're looking for routines to access PCX format files check this book out as that is its preferred format.