Literature and tutorials for writing a ray tracer

Question

I am interested in finding recommendations on books on writing a raytracer, simple and clear implementations of ray tracing that can be seen on the web, and online resources

Answer 1

If you are looking for a single good book that brings you from nothing to working code that can produce images, I started with Andrew Glassner's An Introduction to Ray Tracing. I can't get to Amazon right now but here is the relevant link.

Coincidentally, this is actually the book and problem domain that introduced me to object-oriented design. Boy, that was a while ago....

From there, I would recommend moving on to Pete Shirley's book, as the Wikipedia bibliography seems to imply. Actually, an even better suggestion is to take his ray tracing class. It worked for me!