Computer Graphics
This book I borrowed from a collegue of mine at Tryllian, Peter Tax. It appears to be and have been the standard text for Computer Graphics 101 at Dutch universities and technical universities, because another collegue, Remco Schaar, offered to lend me his copy, which is a new edition. Since I've never done anything academic with computers except for a course in SGML, another in SNOBOl and a last in Pascal for Linguistcs, all this stuff was new to me.
From the three books on computer graphics I've read by now, this one appears to be the most useful. Newman and Sproul was very clear, very well written, but old and only teaches the basics. Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes contains more information (but I'm not interested in 3D stuff, and that takes up the bulk of their book), but was not as well written, not as clear as Newman and Sproul. Hearn and Baker follow a middle course: quite clear, quite extensive Especially in the newer edition; the latest edition even has the examples in C instead of Pascal. Not that I care; I can read Pascal as easily as C, which is to say that both give me a hard time.
What surprises me is that all three books spend quite a lot of time on GUI's. For Newman and Sproull that's forgivable, and even in the days of Hearn and Baker, DOS still reigned supreme. But I was surprised nonetheless. I guess I don't look on buttons and sliders, windows and edit widgets as 'graphics' anymore...