I have ran across a number of tutorials dealing with GLUT. Red Book examples too. Noticed that the Toolkit is old. Meaning that no major revisions lately. That and the NeHe''s and other sites tutorials do not use them as far as I can tell is this style of programming out of date? Should I stay with the style of NeHe''s? Which just uses the OpenGL library directly?

ahh but glut lets you play with openGL without learning the win32 api. yay!

Well, I consider GLUT to be very usefull for the simplicity and compatibility on systems subject. About the efficiency of it by itself, i think its better if you ask Nehe, heh
Also, if the red book uses glut, it must be because of something, other than simplicity...