This is the story of how information lost its body and it is an idea which is now well established in Western culture and technology. Yet, Hayles believes it to be misguided. Any informational pattern, be it pebbles on the beach or electrons whizzing across the internet, must have a physical embodiment to exist. The importance of embodiment is also being discovered in fields such as neurology and experimental robotics. A surprisingly large amount of the information processing essential for being a responsive agent in the world goes on in body parts such as nerves, the spine and the proprioception of joints - our powerful human consciousness is a relatively recent add-on.

Hayles argues that future posthumans will not be the ethereal information-beings of much of current science fiction, but they will certainly have a much more intimate relationship with computers than we do today. In terms of information flows, a collection of humans and computers contains no boundaries between one and the next. As computers approach the complexity of our bodies and information becomes more important to our work and leisure, humans and computers will become more compatible with each other and there will be an increasing potential for one to collapse into the other. Whether this is to the detriment or betterment of humanity represents a cross-roads which urgently needs to be addressed. Hayles is well aware that technology issues such as these currently concern relatively few people - the majority of the world's population has yet to make their first phone call. Yet, now is precisely when such issues need to be aired before our posthuman futures are set in stone as either assimilated components in a vast machine or as free agents with powerful human-integrated technology at our disposal.

Still I missed something. The author(s) also covers gourad shading, texture mapping and several other techniques, but they don't go into depth. Different lighting models were given a formula at best, which fortunately is good enough for me. Just don't expect the book to be API-specific or contain information about rendering methods.
The source code which came with the book compiled, but looks awful and very messy. The source code works very well as a reference, but it you are buying the book mainly for the code; don't. I hope they'll update their source code from the webpage soon.

Conclusion: This is a very good book to start with. It contains all the linear algebra math you'll need to start with 3D-programming, and is explained remarkably well. Yet the simplification is nevertheless no con for non-beginners, which will probably use this book as a reference laying on their desktop at all times :-)