The Ray Tracer Challenge

Acknowledgments

This book exists because my son wanted to learn how to write software. I’d tinkered with ray tracers years ago, hacking on POV-Ray and writing my own simple renderers, so when he asked for my help, my first thought was to walk him through writing one of his own. From that experiment was born an idea, which became an outline, which became a book proposal, which became this book.

So—thank you, Nathaniel!

Enormous thanks go to my wife, Tessa. She not only endured this project but actively encouraged me in it, even while she was neck-deep in her own journey toward a second bachelor’s degree. There’s no way I could have written this book without her support.

Thanks also go to the small army of reviewers who sacrificed their time (and ...