
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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