VTK/Learning VTK

VTK is an extremely powerful and versatile tool, but has a reputation for having a steep learning curve. Here, we hope to organize the resources that may be of use to both VTK users and developers in understanding and using VTK effectively. The key to successfully using VTK are:

1. understanding the structure of the object-oriented hierarchy and
2. understanding it’s pipeline architecture.

If you are new to VTK, you might want to check out: External Tutorials - presentations on VTK by users and developers around the world. This should be helpful to 'get started' with VTK.

Once you have done that, the best way to learn VTK in detail may be:

1. purchase the The VTK Textbook and The VTK Users Guide from Kitware
2. actually see/write VTK code. The following resources will help you do just that:
   1. Examples - Short code examples demonstrating how many of the VTK classes can be used. This is quite an extensive collection.
   2. Tutorials - Slightly longer than the examples, these tutorials explain concepts and demonstrate more complicated tasks in VTK. Note that these cover only certain topics that are not clearly elucidated in the The VTK Users Guide and are not meant as an introduction to beginners.
3. More resources available to help the user are :
   1. The VTK Doxygen Man Pages
   2. The VTK Users Mailing List
   3. Frequently asked questions (FAQ)