i think the true best thing is to just build your own engine from the ground up in openGL. it's labor intensive. and it's not what you should do if you want t

i think the true best thing is to just build your own engine from the ground up in openGL. it's labor intensive. and it's not what you should do if you want to make a game. but, every graphics programmer has an engine. and it is never finished. it's a lifetime project that you can continously keep building, refactoring, and adding onto to learn new things. the only real way to learn programming is by doing. no amount of reading can really burn knowledge into your brain. by implementing things like model->world->camera space transforms, quaternion rotation, shadow mapping, lightmaps, deferred rendering, etc yourself, you will end up intuitively understanding them.