[jameshiew]

Absolutely this. I wish I had spent more time learning about the rendering pipeline before jumping into trying out so much as a "Hello Triangle" tutorial.

It's also worth getting familiar with terminology early on, because common terms in the context of graphics programming have different meanings to their common usage. e.g. I've found it helpful to think of a "vertex" first and foremost as an element of an array, which is processed SIMD-style by the "vertex shader". In most cases it is the co-ordinates of a polygon vertex, but usually with other data bundled in the element as well such as texture co-ordinates. The term "shader" seems to be used for any program that runs on the GPU, regardless of whether it does shading of any kind.

[neutronicus]

Unless you're in CUDA, then it's a "kernel." But in OpenCL it's still a "compute shader"?

Oy vey