We have assumed that the attendees have a strong working knowledge of OpenGL. As much as possible we have tried to include interesting examples involving only those commands in the most readily available version of OpenGL, version 1.1, but we have not restricted ourselves to this version. At the time of this writing, the OpenGL 1.2 specification has been approved as well as the ARB_multitexture extension and implementations are just starting to become available. Consequently, we've used those features when it seemed sensible, but mention that we're doing so.
OpenGL is an evolving standard and we have taken the liberty of incorporating material that uses some multi-vendor extensions and, in some cases, vendor specific extensions. We do this to help make you aware of extensions that we think have general usefulness and should be more widely available.
The course notes include reprints of selected papers describing rendering techniques relevant to OpenGL, but may refer to other APIs such as OpenGL's predecessor, Silicon Graphics' IRIS GL. For new material developed for the course notes, we use terminology and notation consistent with other OpenGL documentation.