"VTK Users guide" - worth it?

[Vincent Guido]

Steven;
     I have seen the User's Guide, and a friend of mine took the class.  We have
been working with VTK on and off for about one year.  I have no graphics
knowledge, but extensive programming experience in C/C++ both in UNIX and Visual
C++.  But even with the two books and the course my friend and I are still
having a difficult time doing the simplest things.  For example, the table of
contents for the user's guide (online) has a section that lists supported file
types, but it is incomplete: It does not reference TIFF files.  Yet there are
two classes for reading and writing TIFF files (see the online manual pages).
Speaking for my friend and I, we do not find the information available (that
includes the User's Guide, the VTK Toolkit book, and the course), to be
user-friendly.

I also found the web-site FAQ describe 400-500 code examples listed by
downloading the source code from the web-site.  Again, it was not obvious which
tar'ed file to download, and when I found it, there were no examples on working
with TIFF files in the so called 400-500 code examples.

I don't know how VTK rates as a graphics package, but it leaves a lot to be
desired in terms of getting started with it as a programmer.

Vinny





"Stephane M." <sequence004 at yahoo.com> on 04/18/2000 10:15:53 AM

To:   vtkusers at public.kitware.com
cc:    (bcc: Vincent Guido/Telcordia)
Subject:  "VTK Users guide" - worth it?




Hi

I'm wondering about the VTK users guide.  I have
already the Visualization book, this is maybe a good
book about visualization but absolutely not a complete
VTK users guide.

So...  the official VTK guide is 60$.  It is a little
expensive for 300 pages.  And more, the shipping for
Canada is 35$!!!  Amazon.com charges 6$ for the
shipping of a book!

With thoses high prices, i'll defer my purchase until
someone convince me that it is worth the trouble.

-Is this book a good reference?
-If i want to "hack" a little in VTK (to use some
openGL primitives unavailable via the VTK API), is
there some information about that?

If not... is there any good web based documentation
and examples?

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