After more than 8 months of hard work, at least 1600 man-hours, writing 13 chapters and 428 pages, Jeff Winder and I are proud to let the world know that our book has finally been published!

With this book we had the goal to write a book for beginners. A book which we would like to read when we were starting with Papervision3D. Taking nothing for granted and gradually work to more advanced topics. Hopefully we have achieved that goal, which will become clear once the copies are sold and we will get feedback from our readers. Now the book is on sale we can finally get feedback from more people other than the very valuable reviewers Trevor Burton, Stuart Caunt and Patrick Rushton.

The book covers many topics in detail, which results to that the book could be used as a reference guide. More than once I've looked back to the chapters that we've written and see how things work. We have chapters dedicated to the following topics:

• Setting up
• Building your first application
• Primitives
• Materials
• Cameras
• Moving things around
• Shading
• External models
• Z-sorting
• Particles
• Filters and effects
• 3D Vector drawing and text
• Optimizing performance

Together with releasing this book, our publisher posted an example chapter on their website. Which is chapter 8 about modeling. I think this chapter gives a good impression on how thouroughly we tried to explain certain topics.

More information about the topics of our book can be found on the website of our publisher. Make sure you'll check out:

• Table of contents
• 3D Vector Drawing and Text with Papervision3D: Part 1
• 3D Vector Drawing and Text with Papervision3D: Part 2 

In the next couple of weeks you can expect some articles here on my blog about subjects that have not made it to the book. So keep an eye on this blog.

But for now, I'm going to enjoy my vacation first and I want to say a big THANK YOU!, to those who have supported us during the writing. Our reviewers Trevor, Patrick and Stuart. The Flash community for posting valuable articles and last but not least the Papervision3D team for their help and answers while writing the book.

Tags: Actionscript, Books, Papervision3D by Paul Tondeur
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I'm very delighted to finally announce that I have been working on the first Papervision3D book that will be released ever. The book is in cooperation with my good friend and co-author Jeff Winder and will be published by Packt Publishing. Since the beginning of this year we have been working extremely hard on the writing of this book. We are ready with the writing of all chapters and are preparing all final drafts right now. So you can expect this book to be published really soon.

The result of our hard work is that we have a book that will be useful for both experienced as non-experienced Papervision3D users. The first few chapters take no knowledge for granted and guides the reader through all steps for getting started with Papervision3D. It describes how to get Flash CS3, Flash CS4, Flex Builder and Flash Builder correctly configured for running Papervision3D code. This includes downloading Papervision3D (SWC, ZIP and a step-by-step guide for downloading from SVN). Once an example project has been compiled, a short introduction to OOP and classes is given for those who have no experience in this. From there the reader book gradually works through more advanced topics, such as loading external models, shading, z-sorting, viewport layers, particles, filters and effects, vector drawing and performance optimizations.

As the book contains much information on a variety of topics it is also interesting for those who already have experience in Papervision3D, but want to extend their knowledge and understanding. It was not aimed to be a reference guide, however it turns out that many topics are thoroughly described and can be used for this purpose as well. (I personally already did this while working on commercial projects that make use of Papervision3D)

Today the book has been announced on the website of our publisher, Packt Publishing and will soon be announced on other websites, like Amazon for example. For both Jeff and myself this is the first book we have ever written. Seeing our book and names listed is already very exciting.

We can't wait to have our book finished and hold the final copy in our hands. We did our best (and still do) to make this a very good book and we are looking forward to hear responses from our readers.  But for now we will continue writing on the last bits. Once there's more news about the exact release date I will post it here on my blog.

[Update 2009-07-29] Papervision3D Essentials - Now listed on Amazon

Tags: Actionscript, Books, Flex, General, Papervision3D, Tutorial by Paul Tondeur
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