Name: An Introduction to ray tracing
ISBN: 9780122861604

What Hacker News says

dahartFeb 2023

Oh hey my oldest got the Nspire, and did jailbreak it with Ndless! ;) She is geeking out at me while I type this with all the games she installed on it (DooM at FULL SPEED, on a calculator!!), and says the games on the calculator are the only reason she passed her math class. She agrees with you, they didn’t teach her how to use the calculator, and feels they should have.

I highly recommend diving into some graphics programming. For me, graphics is opposite of intimidating, and easily one of the best ways ever to motivate math. I love love love writing code that makes pictures & interactive graphics. It helps so much develop a more complete and intuitive understanding compared to the abstract symbolic pedagogy we got in math class. ‘Ray Tracing in One Weekend’ is a really gentle/easy introduction to ray tracing that can lead you down interesting paths depending on your motivation and interest. https://raytracing.github.io/ (Full disclosure, the book was written by a professor of mine, and I helped draw the whiteboard illustrations for the book.) One of the fun bits about ray tracing is it only requires high school math at most to get started, and you can go a long way on that alone, but if you want, you can go super deep on harder stuff, it’s both open-ended with research problems and forgiving & beginner-friendly at the same time. Graphics programming is a fabulous way to motivate matrices too. ShaderToy.com is another pretty easy way to get started, and has endless examples of neat tricks.

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chrsigFeb 2020

I had a really fun time going through the ray tracer challenge recently! It really is an amazing introduction to ray tracing

I've since moved on to the pbr book[0] and finding myself getting much more lost in the math. I'm doing my best to brush up and/or learn all of it, but it's a bit daunting.

It's really telling how reassuring the tests are in the RTC. Right now I can re-implement something from the pbr-book, but I can't really say if I got it right other than by doing a render (and even then, it can be hard to tell).

My plan is to at least go through and write my own tests by doing the math by hand and trying to verify my implementations.

I really wish there were some intermediary book between the two.

[0] http://www.pbr-book.org/

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jlaroccoOct 2016

Maybe my expectations are too high, but that's just a collection of random comments loosely related to graphics. It's a terrible introduction, and it doesn't give any concrete information on how to get started.

My advice for people interested in graphics would be to jump in and get started with a tutorial on the web and then get a book or two to learn more. My recommendations would be:

Introduction To Ray Tracing - It focuses on ray tracing, but many of the topics (vectors, matrices, shading, view transforms, etc.) are applicable regardless of the actual rendering method, and it does a good job explaining all of it.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tracing-Kaufmann-Compute...

Real Time Rendering - This also covers all the math, but focuses on rendering at a higher level and covers more ground.

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Rendering-Third-Tomas-Akeni...

Finally, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice - This is a great general reference for more specific topics. It's like Real Time Rendering expanded to cover more topics and going into more depth. Not a beginner reference, but great to have when you need more information on something.

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-Principles-Practice...

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sluDec 2025

This looks great, will have to check it out. I've always been interested in computer graphics, I even wrote a ray tracer when studying for my master. It was based on the, then, brand new book "An Introduction to Ray Tracing" by Andrew S. Glassner et al. The book is now free to download: https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/an-introduction-to-ra...

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