Hey all,
I've done litterally zero with arb vertex programs or fragment shaders, and although there's a lot of information out there on them, i have no idea where to start. I don't know what's involved with them, and most importantly, i have no idea how to integrate them into my openGL code. (And the openGL SL book, while in depth, lost me sort of quickly because i don't know how to run such code on my mac. Man, I feel stupid.)

Any untanglings of this jumble would be appreciated!!
-dylan

http://forums.digitalthinker.org/index.php?showtopic=93 is a great tutorial on arb_vertex_program...programming. Also googling and grabbing some PDF presentations that are available from ATI and nVidia should help.

Unfortunately the orange book (the OpenGL Shading Language book) isn't going to help you with arb_vertex_program or arb_fragment_program as it teaches you the OpenGL Shading Language, which is a more C-like shading language that's much easier to pick up and use (though GLSL isn't yet available in the OS for any serious use).

Good luck.
It can be confusing at first, but after running through some examples and toying around, it'll make sense.