Agreed. I'm currently teaching myself OpenGL, but only after getting pretty comfortable with using SDL and SFML for 2D graphics (drawing directly to a buffer in

Agreed. I'm currently teaching myself OpenGL, but only after getting pretty comfortable with using SDL and SFML for 2D graphics (drawing directly to a buffer in SDL, and using SFML to draw textured shapes, sprites, and such). 3D has a whole ton of boilerplate; it's better to start with something a little simpler to experiment with some patterns.