Little Black Book of Ray-Tracing and Path-Tracing (Paperback)

Recommended, with the caveat that it is not a gentle introduction.

I read this over a couple of weekends alongside a small side project, which turned out to be the ideal way to approach it. The balance between theory and practice is well judged; neither side dominates. The book rewards careful reading. Skimming it would be a mistake. Four stars, and I suspect a second edition could easily push it to five.

A genuinely enjoyable read that also taught me a great deal.

This is the third book I have read on graphics this year, and it is comfortably the best of them. I appreciated the honesty about what the book does not cover — it saved me from expecting things that were not there. The code samples assume a particular environment, which took a bit of fiddling to get running properly. There is a section near the end that ties several earlier ideas together in a way I had not seen before. I have already recommended it to two colleagues and will recommend it to more.

Exactly the book I needed. Straight to the point and genuinely useful.

I have been working with graphics for a few years now and I still found plenty here that was new to me. The early chapters move quickly through material I already knew, but the later sections were genuinely new to me. The index and cross-references are surprisingly good, which matters for a book I will come back to. The author clearly knows the subject deeply and has thought hard about how to teach it. An easy five stars from me. I look forward to whatever the author writes next.