VTK User's Guide

The perfect example of spending 500 pages to explain what could be done in 5. If you have to, get the free pdf version on vtk's website. This book is not for anyone who actually wants to get work done. I count this as a valid reason for users to look for a different library to use.Instead of valuing your time and treating you like an adult, the authors start on a lecture course from the birth of the universe to present day time as we know it. Don't buy it. You don't have to anyway because the pdf is free.

You had better already thoroughly understand visualization and know the VTK before you consult this book. In fact, you should know everything about the VTK and how exactly you'll use it before you waste your time hoping to get any help from this book. It just touches briefly on a lot of material then takes off again on another topic. Nothing every in-depth enough to be useful. No tutorials, no introductions, no real explanations. Just a reference and not a good one at that.The VTK is a quagmire already and this book does nothing to help except drain your wallet.

Item as expected. This in not a review of the contents of the book. But the physical condition of the book was better than I expected.

Book is quite informable but delivery was on 10 days longer then I expect.

Covers the topic!

I have read through multiple chapters of the book by now. What strikes me is the absence of proofreading on the text. It is full of typographical errors, from missing highlights to odd fonts to missing paragraphs and other paragraphs that repeat unexpectedly, to examples given that are irrelevant to the surrounding text. Errors show up about every other page.From a book costing $80 I'd expect much, much more, even if the software comes free.Other than this, I had trouble locating the source code of some of the examples.If VTK intends to become a broadly used toolkit and architecture, I think they should snap out of the close-knit community mentality, where all the developers know each other, and grow up.

This is an extremely helpful introduction to USING and developing VTK. In 2004 knowing nothing about scientific visualization I was able to bootstrap and develop a number of apps in Python by working through the relevant sections of this book. The guide clearly explains the VTK file formats and VTK's data structures. As I started writing classes to extend VTK in C++ I found the developer sections, especially the sections on the pipeline internals to be invaluable. I'm only giving 4 stars because the book hasn't kept pace with VTK evolution.

Becareful, this book is the VTK API user guide and you can mistaken it for the other book Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics, 4th Edition.