I'm speaking from the point of view of opportunity costs. For learning computer graphics programming through ray tracing something like Peter Shirleys "Raytrac

I'm speaking from the point of view of opportunity costs. For learning computer graphics programming through ray tracing something like Peter Shirleys "Raytracing in one weekend" and then onwards to Pharr, Jakob and Humphreys "Physically based rendering" would be a much better learning path. OpenGL and real time graphics are another beast entirely and to learn those well you must preferably work in the industry for a while (mainly because it's a fairly deep topic and you need professional level enthusiasm to progress much). For hobbyist programmers Unity is a much better platform to get familiar with real time rendering than just taking the Red Book. I tried the Red Book route long time ago without much other domain understanding of computer graphics - not really the best way to move forward. And yeah, I was familiar wirh Povray at that point and frankly - that knowledge did not help me much.