I learned so much from this website many years ago when I was first discovering webgl programming. It is unfortunately unfinished, yes, but those unfinished chapters on advanced topics make for curiosity and the desire to learn more. There are plenty of other resources that fill in the details, but this is a great beginner guide.

interesting that even though it’s such a cherished resource no one’s taken up the flag to complete it after all this time.

https://iquilezles.org/articles/ Also recommend this as a resource, immensely useful and full of examples.

If you stick with Web 3D, no worries, because those standards by nature of the Web standards, are also like trailing behind 10 years in native 3D hardware capabilities.

Also they have the benefit of having been designed from the ground up for managed languages on the host side.

The major paint point is lack of debugging tools, as browser vendors don't see as a priority having that kind of support on their developer tools.

Honestly this is exactly the kind of area where I’ve found things like OpenAI’s Deep Research and Anthropic’s Advanced Research help a ton. Tell the LLM what you’ve learned, what kinds of things you want to know, and if you don’t know what you want to know then heck, tell it how you feel (like you just did in this comment). I generally try to give it a nice chunky paragraph or two of background and questions.

In my experience, the LLM is usually good at surveying the field, finding resources you might not have found, and evaluating the quality of learning resources. The report that comes back might be super juicy, or it might just point you in some new directions, but it will probably help you get unstuck.

Yes, this is exactly what this website is for, and the interactive examples put you right in to programming in glsl and give such an awesome base to experiment.

There are plenty of resources out there as you get more advanced, but imo bookofshaders is a great starting resource.

Try looking up Ben Cloward on YouTube. He's quite concise and thorough.

Fragment shaders are perhaps over over-represented due to old WebGL style and easiness of integration, full screen quad + a shader is quite self contained setup.

Compute shaders are much more interesting and widely used in modern graphics though. No fixed rasterizing setup needed, just buffers for data in/out and a kernel with access to the usual GPU syncing primitives in between.

What real engineering work do you mean?