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How to use this book in a classroom with RaspberryPi?
A classroom can be a hard place to teach shaders because of technical limitations. A few years ago, taking for granted that all the students would have a computer with a modern graphic card was a long shot, but not today. Thanks to the RaspberryPi project a new type of small and cheap generation of computers ($35) has found its way into classrooms. Most importantly for the purposes of this book, the RaspberryPi comes with a decent Bradcom GPU card that can be accessed directly from the console. I made a flexible GLSL live coding tool that runs all the examples in this book while also updating automatically the changes the user makes when they save it. By making a local copy of the repository of this book (see the above section) and having the glslViewer app installed, students can read the chapters using any console text reader (like less, nano or vim), run the examples (with glslviewer), and modify them with their favorite text editor (like nano, pico, vi, vim or emacs).
To install and set this all up on the RaspberryPi after installing the OS and logging in, type the following commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install git-core libfreeimage
cd ~
git clone http://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/glslViewer.git
cd glslViewer
make
make install
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/thebookofshaders.git
cd thebookofshaders
At the end of each section you will find code and non-code based exercises to give to your students. They are designed to help students immediately put concepts into practice, making concrete the abstract principles of parallel programming.