The Renderman Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics

For me, a beginner, the book was a little heavy and terse. Although it is written well, some concepts require more explaination. Also, the use of the C binded RenderMan API, is a little old, and makes it annoying when writing a RIB from the examples in the book. Regardless of the level of expertise required beforehand, it is a great reference book, and provides a good reference to all RenderMan users.

Altough dated, "The Renderman companion" is a mandatory reference for all Renderman users. This book describes and explain all the aspects of the Renderman interface (in a no specific implementation way) and teach the art of shader programming, illustrating it with high quality color plates. Renderman is a very complex system, but this book make it affordable. The big missed item: no reference about the RIB file format.

This is an amazing book about an amazing product and specification. If you want to really learn what computer graphics is all about, you could do no better than read this book. RenderMan was written by the smartest people in the subject, and is the product of years of both insight and trial-and-error.This book is clear, concise, and still extremely timely even 10 years later (a lifetime in CG). A new edition couldn't hurt though, encompassing some more recent change.

If you want to work with RenderMan (Pixar's, BMRT, RenderDotC's or whatever) and RIB (RenderMan Interface Binary) while using C, this is the book. It's not only good, it's the one that everyone who already uses RenderMan recommends. Buy it. It's what all the cool kids are doing =)

If you're working with renderers like RenderMan or BMRT, you've gotta get this book. It covers the C binding for creating RIB files, as well as going over the various features of RenderMan. Between this book and the RenderMan manual (on Pixar's Web site), you can get started with hacking together your own RIB files and procedural animations.