This 20-part tutorial (and more coming) is suitable for people who are learning programming by themselves, or who know programming but don't know anything about graphics. Programming students may also use it as additional material for programming courses. Bored of those dry programming assignments? Maybe it's time to try something fun.
Available now for your enjoyment at:
http://iki.fi/sol/gp/
When I was starting on graphics programming, and programming in general, the learning curve was somewhat easier than it is these days. Complex APIs, messages, threads, triangles and stuff - you need to know tons and tons more stuff than in the old days. On a 286 DOS system, all you needed was a couple lines of (granted, rather cryptic) assembler, and you were set.
So, to make things slightly easier, I decided to write a tutorial on how to play with pixels. The tutorial is based on SDL, as that's the easiest way (IMHO) to put some pixels these days. My goal was to try to make the person who is reading the tutorial interested in playing with the computer, and to find that programming can, after all, be fun. The tutorial consists of short, understandable functions that make interesting things happen, and there's hints on additional stuff that the student can try to play around with the code.
After the first six chapters the tutorial took a new turn and is now covering the building of a complete game from scratch to polish; there's still a lot of ground to cover, but the currently published set already ends up in a playable game.
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