This book series is great—I built an entire pathtracer in R (rayrender)* following this series. I'd recommend reading these books and then reading Matt Pharr's

This book series is great—I built an entire pathtracer in R (rayrender)* following this series. I'd recommend reading these books and then reading Matt Pharr's "Physically Based Rendering", also available for free online (http://www.pbr-book.org http://www.pbr-book.org). Starting with a pathtracer based on Peter's book and then slowly integrating elements of PBRT (the pathtracer featured in PBR) as needed has been a great pedagogical exercise: RTIOW teaches using a bottom-up approach, while PBR very top-down. If you've written the pathtracer described in RTIOW, you end up with a much fuller understanding of many of the choices made in PBRT. Also, PBR is getting a fourth edition this year that goes into fully GPU rendering—it's a great time to start learning about pathtracing! *Rayrender Github: https://www.github.com/tylermorganwall/rayrender https://www.github.com/tylermorganwall/rayrender Website/Docs: https://www.rayrender.net https://www.rayrender.net