Reddit mentions of Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus-Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization (Other Sams)

Andre LaMothe has some amazing books on how to write games from scratch once you have learned C/C++. They are a bit dated, but his ability to explain math and other low level concepts is fantastic.

How to write a 3d game engine all in software (no opengl/direct x):

http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Programming-Gurus-Advanced-Graphics-Rasterization/dp/0672318350/ref=la_B000ARBG92_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405533453&sr=1-4

Writing 2D games:

http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Windows-Game-Programming-Gurus/dp/0672323699/ref=la_B000ARBG92_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405533453&sr=1-8

I would recommend reading his books, and porting his code to modern C++ and using the SDL lib to gain access to graphics and sound.

It's worth mentioning learning programming itself is a huge challenge. Learning game programming on top of that even more so. It's a process that will take most people a few years of constant learning before they start to get "good" at it. Don't get discouraged by how difficult it is to jump it, just keep at it.

Software means that you do all the math and rendering yourself and don't use the graphics card at all (which does a lot of the manual work for you). If you want to learn about 3D rendering I'd say a software renderer is the way to go.

There may be other software rendering books but the one I've read is Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus-Advanced 3D Graphics and Rasterization by Andre LaMothe (https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Programming-Gurus-Advanced-Graphics-Rasterization/dp/0672318350) I think it is a really great book and I've learned a lot!

Also there is a free video series called Handmade Hero (https://hero.handmade.network/episode/code) while he is only doing a 2d software renderer basically all of the 2d concepts apply to 3d and I find that he is a very good teacher.

(Warning, very hardcore) This book literally creates an entire 3D engine: http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Programming-Gurus-Advanced-Graphics-Rasterization/dp/0672318350

It's all pure CPU so you learn exactly what is happening.

When I was about your age I devoured this book: https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Programming-Gurus-Advanced-Graphics-Rasterization/dp/0672318350

While the C++ in there may be a bit dated at this point, I think it would still provide a great foundation. It teaches you to write a 3D rendering engine entirely in software without using the GPU. Once you get through the book you will have a much better idea of what graphics APIs are actually doing under the hood and in hardware.

Also, I highly recommend this sequence: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab

It's very visual and intuitive and doesn't get too bogged down in equations. Even if you don't have a bunch of formulas memorized as a result of going through it, you should come out of it knowing what all of the tools that you need for 3D math are and what they can do.

11 years ago I had to write a software rasterizer that was GL 1.1 compatible. It was supposed to run on a headless server. For various reasons we couldn't use Mesa (an OpenGL software renderer), so I was tasked with writing our own.

The whole thing simply rasterized to a block of memory, which could then be saved in various formats or blitted to a window for real-time graphics. Feature wise, it was pretty complete, save for some obscure OGL features we didn't need. It ran at 20-30fps for (then) moderately complex scenes with a few thousand triangles, more than fast enough for rendering stills on the server, given the expected number of requests per second and caching.

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice helped with some aspects, but the best resource back then was Tiricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus which I use as a reference to this day.