Course Overview

What this GLSL course covers, how to use it, prerequisites.

A self-contained, hands-on course covering the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) for OpenGL, OpenGL ES/WebGL, and Vulkan: the graphics pipeline, shader stages, data types and qualifiers, built-in functions, vertex and fragment shading, textures, lighting, normal mapping, procedural graphics, post-processing, shadows, geometry/tessellation/compute shaders, physically based rendering, deferred shading, ray marching, Vulkan GLSL and SPIR-V, modern extensions (mesh shaders, ray tracing, subgroups), performance, debugging, and complete projects. Every chapter has runnable examples and exercises.

Course Map

Part I — Foundations Introduction to Shaders & GLSL The Graphics Pipeline Tools & Environment Setup

Your First Shaders (OpenGL, WebGL, Shadertoy) Versions, Profiles & Preprocessor Vectors, Matrices & Swizzling

Storage, Layout, Precision & Interpolation Qualifiers Operators & Expressions Control Flow & Functions Part II — Core Shading Techniques Vertex Shaders & Transformations Fragment Shaders, Color & Blending

Uniforms, Uniform Blocks & Host Communication Textures & Samplers Lighting: Phong & Blinn–Phong Normal, Parallax & Environment Mapping

Procedural Graphics: Shapes, SDFs, Noise, Patterns Color Spaces, Gamma & HDR Tone Mapping Framebuffers & Post-Processing Instancing, Animation & Skinning Part III — Advanced GLSL

Shader Storage Buffers, Images & Atomics Physically Based Rendering (PBR) & Image-Based Lighting

Deferred Shading & Screen-Space Effects (SSAO, SSR) Ray Marching & Signed Distance Fields in 3D

GPU Particles, Water, Terrain & Volumetrics Vulkan GLSL & SPIR-V

Modern Extensions: Subgroups, Bindless, Mesh Shaders, Ray Tracing GLSL ES & WebGL Specifics Debugging & Tooling

Shader Architecture: Includes, Variants, Cross-Compilation Part IV — Projects & Real-World GLSL Best Practices & Style

Appendices: Cheat Sheet, Keywords, Built-ins, Math Reference, Resources, Study Plan