PaP is the quintisential graphics refrence.
I have a copy of the second edition and there's more in these 1200 pages than I'll ever get to know. I mean for crying out loud, it has four authors. If someone said to me it was because one brain couldn't hold all that info, I'd believe them. It's written by stuffy university types and can be a very boring read, making the learning curve on this text very steep. I owe Andre for giving me my foothold in 3D. Before I owned any other 3D books, I owned this.