[exDM69]

Stay away from NeHe tutorials, they are badly written and really old. Pretty much everything they cover is deprecated and done in otherwise old fashioned ways.

This is a big problem with OpenGL tutorials in general, a lot of them cover old stuff that shouldn't be used any more.

The entire OpenGL fixed function pipeline is deprecated, replaced by programmable shader pipeline. It's a lot more work to get simple stuff done with shaders but it pays off in the end.

If you're looking to write a game (and not an engine) it may be a good idea to get an engine and not write "raw" OpenGL at all.

[BlackDeath3]

If all you're looking to do is simple stuff (like get a rectangle on the screen), shaders are not required, correct?

[exDM69]

You do need shaders for pretty much everything.

But if you only want to draw a rectangle with a solid color, you can do that using the scissor test and clearing "the screen". But that's about all you can do without shaders.

[Narishma]

They are, unless you use old deprecated versions of OpenGL.

[BlackDeath3]

So the simplest program using the simplest shader would use a pass-through shader that doesn't modify the inputs?