Book has no keyword index?

Hi, I recently purchased the textbook version of Metal by Tutorials since I’ve always found that to be an easier way to learn about things especially since I tend to flip back and forth between sections as I go, and I was disappointed to find that there’s no keyword index in the back of the book.

Is there any online resource for finding at least which chapters to go to in order to look up specific concepts? Unfortunately the sorts of concepts I’m looking up are on the more low-level side of things rather than the high-level topic chapters (for example, wanting to look up specifics on providing uniforms to shaders, or on creating buffers, or so on).

Hi, fluffycritter! I’m the Book Team Lead here at raywenderlich.com, and I really appreciate the suggestion. We’ll look into whether providing an index of concepts is something we can start adding to our books.

In the meantime, we try to list the most important concepts for each chapter in the “Key Points” section at the end of each chapter. That might be a way to help you find the information you’re looking for until we can get other indexing ideas in place.

Thanks so much for the feedback!

Another tip that might be helpful: If you visit the book on our website, you can search for terms and it will show you the chapters in which they appear. You won’t be able to read the text if you don’t own the online version of the book, but you can find the chapter to look up in your physical copy.

I know that’s clunky, but it is a quicker way to find what you’re looking for.

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Searching online seems like an okay stopgap. But unfortunately, the specific things I’m looking for aren’t listed in the TOC in the front matter, and also having an alphabetical list of keywords is way more useful than having to vgrep through a bunch of high-level concepts.

For this book in particular I was really hoping for something akin to the classic OpenGL “red book,” but for Metal instead; you can read it linearly for a step-by-step tutorial, but there’s also a comprehensive index and a few appendices which make it also useful as a partial standalone resource.

One specific example: I wanted to look up how to add uniforms to a shader. When I search online, that turns out to be in the chapter on coordinate spaces. There’s no way that I’d have thought to look there, because while uniforms are used to configure the coordinate space in a vertex shader, they’re a much more general concept than that.

Like, it totally makes sense to talk about uniforms there, but that’s not the place I’d expect to look for it from a syntax/API standpoint.

Thanks for the specific example! That will be helpful for us as we consider how to make our information clearer moving forward.