Before looking into various rendering effects and playing with carefully selected code snippets, let us first get a glimpse of the history of OpenSceneGraph, learn about its structures and capabilities, and join a web community to learn and discuss OSG online. You will also have the chance to create a "Hello World" application in OSG style, through which you will gain necessary information about OSG's syntax and structure.

In this book, OSG is short for OpenSceneGraph. It will be used from time to time to replace OpenSceneGraph's full name, for convenience.