WebGL Programming Guide

The WebGL Programming Guide is a technical tutorial that systematically explains the native WebGL API and the fundamentals of 3D graphics. The original English edition is WebGL Programming Guide: Interactive 3D Graphics Programming with WebGL; it was translated by Xie Guanglei and published by Publishing House of Electronics Industry in June 2014, totaling about 640,000 characters over 500 pages. The book follows a "run the example first, then understand the principle" approach, beginning with the relationship between WebGL and HTML5 canvas and guiding readers through a complete practical path: clearing the drawing area, drawing a point, drawing a triangle, then colored polygons, textures, lighting, hierarchical models, and even shadows and post-processing effects. Core topics include how the WebGL rendering pipeline and shaders work; writing vertex and fragment shaders; the purposes and differences of attribute, uniform, and varying variables; matrix transformations and combining model, view, and perspective matrices; the GLSL ES shading language; color buffers, depth testing, and alpha blending; texture mapping and multiple textures; and using offscreen framebuffers for picking operations and selecting objects in a scene with the mouse. Most examples come in paired HTML and JavaScript files that readers can run directly in a browser and experiment with using the companion source code. The end of the book discusses advanced topics such as fog, framebuffer rendering, normal mapping, and point sprites, plus a complete integrated virtual-scene case. The book presupposes little mathematical background for 3D graphics concepts and serves as a systematic introduction to WebGL from beginner to intermediate level.