During the eight years since the publication of the first edition of Computer Graphics for Java Programmers, the programming language Java has increasingly become the language of choice in many industrial and business domains. Hence the skills for developing computer graphics applications using Java have been highly in demand but are surprisingly lacking in the computer science curricula. Meanwhile, for the past five years the second author has been teaching Computer Graphics at his current university using the first edition of this textbook, and felt that there was a need to update the book. We therefore decided to jointly write this second edition.
This edition continues the main theme of the first edition, that is, graphics programming in Java, with plenty of source code available to the reader. The new edition has, however, been updated as follows:
The contents of some chapters have been updated, as a result of the authors' years of classroom experience and recent feedback from our students.
An instructor's manual has been created to include lecture slides and answers to exercise questions.
Chapter 8 has been replaced by a new chapter covering the topic of fractals.
A beta version of a companion software package has been added, which demonstrates the working of different algorithms and concepts introduced in the book.
More illustrative examples have been included in several chapters and various minor errors in the first edition have been corrected.
Over the past few years, Java has evolved into more powerful programming environments. The most notable development related to computer graphics is its support for 3D graphics. Many application examples illustrated in this book could be readily implemented using Java 3D without any understanding of the internal working of the implementation, which we consider undesirable for computer science students. We therefore believe that this textbook continues to serve as an indispensable introduction to the foundation of computer graphics, on which many application program interfaces (APIs) and graphics libraries could be developed, and more importantly, how they are developed.
As in the first edition, the example programs can again be downloaded from the Internet at:
http://home.planet.nl/~ammeraal
or at:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~kzhang/BookCG/
In writing this second edition, several people need to be acknowledged for their direct or indirect contributions. We would first like to thank the UT-Dallas graduate students Bill Fahle, Andy Restrepo, Janis Schubert, and Subramanya Suresh, who contributed to different parts of the demonstration software. In particular, we appreciate the great effort of Janis Schubert in developing and integrating different parts of the software while striving to maintain the same look and feel of the user interfaces. Finally, we thank Jonathan Shipley of John Wiley and Sons for his enthusiastic support and assistance in publishing this edition.
Leen Ammeraal, The Netherlands
Kang Zhang, USA