A quick tour of Cinder
As a Cinder developer with two years experience, I have looking forward to this first Cinder book for long time. And lucky enough, I got the chance to obtain a free copy from publisher.
The biggest merit of the book is its size, you can finish reading it in about one hour. And you will catch all the the core features of Cinder, including image loading, CPU image processing, OpenGL rendering, audio playing and interaction with mouse and keyboard. Due to the size, this book can’t cover enough details, it requires a basic understanding of C++ language, the reader must be familiar with ideas like class and string.
If you have previous game development experience, or have used similar frameworks such as openFrameworks, then the book is enough to let you enter the world of Cinder. However it may be difficult to Processing users due to different syntax and complicated IDE setups. Visual Studio under Windows and Xcode under Mac. The good news is chapter 3 is contributed to step-to-step setups of these two environments.
The shortcoming of the book is it’s only targeted at beginners, so if you are already a Cinder user, you will be disappointed.
The book has 11 chapters, but only 10 of them are printed in the book, the 11th chapter is offered on line and free of charge. This chapter explains how to let Cinder talk with other softwares, with the help of Syphon and OSC protocol. This chapter is really nice, I don’t why it’s excluded from the printed book.
简短快速的 Cinder 介绍书籍
作为一名有着两年 Cinder 使用经历的开发者，对于社区中出版的第一本书籍期待已久。机缘巧合，得到了这次免费的试读机会。
本书最大的特点是小巧，你可以在一小时内看完，同时了解到 Cinder 最常用的函数，包括图像载入、图像处理、OpenGL 渲染、声音播放、鼠标键盘交互。本书并不会过多讲解细节，它假设你预先拥有 C++ 基础知识，至少知道 class 和 string。
如果你有游戏开发的经验，或者更有针对性地学习过 openFrameworks，那么通过此书可以快速找到 Cinder 的感觉。但是对于 Processing 的用户而言，这个过程会比较坎坷，因为语法差异很大，并且需要配置复杂的继承开发环境。在 Windows 下是 Visual Studio，在 Mac 下是 Xcode。好消息是本书有专门一章手把手讲解如何配置这两种不同的开发环境。
本书的缺点是它只针对初学者，对于拥有 Cinder 基础的人无法带来新的知识。
本书很厚道地提供了一章免费的试读，讲解了如何与其他开发环境通信，使用的通信工具有 Syphon 和 OSC 协议。这章非常精彩，不知为何并没有放入实体书中。