Yeah, I've noticed in physics programming in other peoples code you can often come across the non-trig ways of doing things that avoid unit vectors and rooting

Yeah, I've noticed in physics programming in other peoples code you can often come across the non-trig ways of doing things that avoid unit vectors and rooting etc (which are both elegant and efficient)... However i've never personally come across an explicit explanation or "tutorials" of these targeted at any level of programmer's vector proficiency. Instead i've always discovered them in code, and had to figure out how they work. I guess the smart people writing a lot of this stuff just assume everyone will derive them as they go. That's why we need more Inigo Quilez's :D to lay it out for us mere mortals and encourage it's use more widely.