I had the distinct pleasure of reading WebGL: Up and Running from O'Reilly. I'll be honest and say a lot of the mathematics was a bit hard to grok, but I never truly understood how powerful WebGL was before I read this book. It makes anything Canvas can do look pretty tame. Support is a bit low right now (partially supported around 50%), but its worthwhile to take a look at it now. At minimum, use it as a way to warm up those old Math-related muscles in your brain. I'd love to know if any of my readers out there are using WebGL yet. Anyone?
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I looked into WebGL about a year ago, so my info may be well out of date. But one looke at the 200+ lines of code (much involving shaders) just to get a triangle up on the screen as a sort of Hello World and I could tell that WebGL was a language to be used by libraries and compilers, not directly by humans. You may as well be coding in Assembler again.
Sadly, it almost makes me long for the days of VRML. At least that was nice and declarative, had primitives, and a sensible lighting model.
Having said all of that, I look forward to seeing what the abstraction libraries sitting on top of WebGL will be able to do.
If you check the book, Rick, he actually spends a lot of time with a library that does a lot of the grunt work for you.