This book by Thomas Strothotte and Stefan Sclechtweg comes across as quite a dilemma for me. On the one hand, its applied science obviously works (if not, we would not be enjoying the kind of software packages many of us are using day in, day out), and on the other hand, however, its "ontological moorings" are very weak indeed.

Overview
I will first briefly review the book's presentation in a historical context of "Non-Photorealistic Rendering" (NPR), as it offers much interesting information about the origins, present state and possible future (uses, areas of potential development, and so on) of this applied science.

The book provides much information of a very technical nature, including a plethora of algorithms, which will no doubt be of interest to those who are involved with designing software (something that seems to be on the increase with digital artists as well as the people who now try to escape the "Photoshop curse" by attempting to design their own tools based on priorities distinct from those behind the purposes of Photoshop). Here the declared target audience consists of computer science students, practitioners and researchers in the field.

Each chapter ends with a set of exercises, reminding us that both authors are teaching computer science at the University of Magdeburg in Germany, and that this book was first born as a series of courses taught both at Magdeburg, and at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada).

A serious shortcoming of not only this book, but of much of our applied sciences as a whole today is what Husserlian Phenomenology would label as "ontologizing" (Ontologisierung), a view that posits an "objective world" as the obligatory starting point of our investigations, rather than as "only one of" the many possible results of our deep seated intentionality. (More on this later.)

The book reviews both the "algorithmic" (computer science) and "user-centered" (humanities) facets of NPR. I submit that it is fairly lopsided on the side of computer science while weak on the user-centered one.

However, I still recommend reading/buying this book, if only because of its presentation of much of what is under the hood of what we use daily, something that could help us understand more of what supports the applications we use every day. The book is also recommended for the glimpses it can provide (by its absence) into all that is missing in modern applied science in terms of what makes us "human." Whoever says "user-centered" is implying a great deal about both epistemology and ontology, and this implied understanding of the underlying structure of experience is what I find particularly weak here.