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I am inspired to start programming some things in OpenGL, using c++.
Can anyone list here what tools should be installed to start this process.
Ie
IDE
Compiler
OpenGL download etc?
The Ne-He tutorials (to which @wich has already kindly provided a link) are quite good for what they are (but at least the last time I looked carefully, the OpenGL the teach and work with is quite dated).
glut, however, I’d generally avoid. It has a fair number of bugs, and nobody’s working on fixing them. It was basically abandoned in a beta test state in the late 1990s, so it seems doubtful (at best) that anybody will ever even try to fix them.
A couple of alternatives to glut (both apparently in active development) are GLFW and FLTK. Between these, GLFW is much closer to glut in character — a small toolkit for abstracting away most of the OS-dependent parts, so you can produce OpenGL programs with relatively little hassle. FLTK is really a full-blown GUI toolkit (though rather small as GUI toolkits go) that has a built-in glut emulation (that, at least the last time I played with it, seemed considerably better implemented than glut itself).
I suppose I should also point out one more alternative to glut: freeglut is a free re-implementation of the glut API. I can’t say I really recommend it, but at least it’s been actively developed a lot more recently than the original glut.
When/if you decide you want to play around with shaders, both AMD and nVidia have developer web pages. nVidia’s, in particular, has a huge amount of free “stuff” available (just beware that it’s easy to burn all too many hours playing around with their demos and such).