An Introduction to Ray Tracing (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

This book covers the high points of the concepts involved with ray-tracing. It spends a fair amount of time talking about ray-object intersections, and also briefly discusses various approaches to accelerate the ray tracing process. This book does not go into a high level of detail on most topics, but does introduce them to the reader and discuss the pros and cons, which would give the reader enough knowledge to seek more detailed references on those subjects.This book assumes the user has some amount of programming experience, and is familiar with analytic geometry. Overall, it does a good job explaining what ray tracing is, and its various aspects. Definitely a good introductory book in the area.

While some books treat ray tracing like a method for geniuses, this one try to demystify it. The highlights, in general, go into "why" and "how" to do. Maybe the best parts are the "dictionary" of "ray-intersection" formulas and mainly the practical outline of a real ray tracer. This book don't teach you to do a ray tracer for Hollywood, but it's a very good beginning.

This book is a classic - by which I mean that the coverage of the basics is so thorough and clear that even if new techniques are developed (and certainly they will be) this will be a great introductory text even when it's many year out of print.

For those just getting into ray tracing, this book is a great introduction to the semantics of raytracing. Not your usual book focusing just on the math, but also shows you how to begin implementing a ray tracer.

"An Introduction to Ray Tracing" is an excellent nuts and bolts summary of the science and practice of ray tracing. Easy to read source code examples are included, providing the programming-oriented reader with a good start on writing their own ray tracer. Glassner's easy to read style will also appeal to the less code-savvy. The book is useful in a classroom environment or self-directed study