Part III. The Apocrypha

Now we come to some important material that lies outside the true canon of pure OpenGL. Although OpenGL itself remains purely a platform-independent abstraction of graphics hardware, there is always the need to interface OpenGL with native OSs and windowing systems. On each platform, there are families of nonportable binding functions that glue OpenGL to the native window or display system. This part of the book is about those interfaces.

The three most popular platforms for OpenGL today are undoubtedly Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX. You’ll find here specific chapters that will take you through the peculiarities of using OpenGL on these platforms. Finally, we will strip OpenGL down to its bare essentials for use on hand-held and embedded systems. OpenGL is by far the most popular 3D graphics API today, used in nearly every application category, on nearly every platform where 3D hardware can be found.

OpenGL. It’s everywhere. Do the math.