9 - Sources

Summary

This book has only scratched the surface of a large and evolving topic. This chapter lists various sources for those seeking further information. Although the lists may seem overwhelming, three sources may suffice for most purposes:

1. the Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry for short surveys,

2. the Computational Geometry Community Bibliography for bibliographic information, and

3. the Directory of Computational Geometry Software for software.

Each of these and many other sources are mentioned below.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND FAQs

Because computational geometry is a relatively young field, much of its literature is only available in primary sources: conference proceeding papers and journal articles. Fortunately, the community has developed a nearly comprehensive bibliography, freely available via ftp, complete with searching software. At this writing the bibliography contains 10,000 entries; fewer than 500 are books. I describe the Computational Geometry Community Bibliography in O'Rourke (1993). Its URL is ftp://ftp.cs.usask.ca/pub/geometry/.

Other bibliographies that include papers in computational geometry are available, most notably the ACM SIGGRAPH Online Bibliography at ftp://siggraph.org/publications/bibliography/.

Each Usenet newsgroup maintains a “FAQ,” a file of answers to “frequently asked questions.” There is no newsgroup specifically devoted to computational geometry, but a good portion of the traffic in comp. graphics.algorithms concerns geometric algorithms.