Reviewing Panda3D 1.7 game developer's cookbook

A few weeks ago I was kindly invited to review Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook, an excellent opportunity to gain some insight of this engine. Even when real life problems prevented me from throughly testing all sample code including with the book, I could get an idea about how Panda3D works.
The book covers the process of creating your projects, setting up Visual Studio and NetBeans and briefly talks about the Panda arquitecture, which remembers me Unigine, because it heavily relies on Python scripts (you can use the engine's interpreter to launch your game). And here are the two cons of this book: first, it doesnt covers any plataform except Windows, so, if you want to work under OS X or Linux you are pretty much on your own. Perhaps the NetBeans instructions can hel a bit. The second big con is that C++ receives a minimal attention, just a short sample. From there, you are again on your own. This shouldnt be a problem, as I said, Panda3D is like Unigine and probably the idea is that you avoid C++. Eventually you get used to it.
The rest of the book is comprised of several recipes detailing small topics, like loading a terrain, an object, adding sounds to the scene... I really like this structure, because it is easy to find the topic you want without having to go through the code of a complex sample. Please, consider that this title is about Panda3D, not about developing games. It is your task to convert all those small recipes in an actual game. Perhaps some of you would miss a more complex code integrating all the little pieces, but thats not my case.
Despite being a bit hard to me reading all that Python code, I have to say that based on this book, I like Panda3D. So, if you plan to use this engine, I would recommend it as a reference text you can not miss. I hope it helps to make this engine more popular among game developers.

OpenGL tutorials (more)

OpenGL samples pack 4.1.6.0 has been released, containing 100 code samples covering a large part of the OpenGL 4.1 API, including some recent extensions. Also,a  three-part tutorial about OpenGL and OpenGL ES is available at DB Interactively: 1, 2 and 3. It goes from basic to advanced, so it is approved for newbies.

Ogre 1.7.3

Time for another Cthuga bugfix release! Nothing really interesting, but it is good to know that the current branch is being polished.