The Ray Tracer Challenge »

Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! It's easier than you think. In just a couple of weeks, build a ray tracer that renders beautiful scenes with shadows, reflections, and brilliant refraction effects. With each chapter, implement another piece of the puzzle in whichever language and environment you prefer, and do it entirely test-first. Recharge yourself with this project's immense potential for personal exploration, experimentation, and discovery.

A Swift Kickstart, Second Edition »

Newly updated! This best-selling book gets experienced programmers up to speed quickly with Swift. This new version is updated to Swift 5 and is filled with hands-on examples that you can follow along with on a Mac using Xcode or on an iPad using Swift Playgrounds. Learn the basics of Swift programming, including functions, variables, constants, and types, then expand your skills with classes, structs, enumerations, and protocols.

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Pixar worked on their internal ray tracer, RenderMan, from 1984 until its first internal release in 1988. It was another seven years before they released their first feature-length animated film in 1995. RenderMan continues to be the company's primary rendering engine, with continual updates that take advantage of more powerful hardware. Building your own ray tracer might seem like an impossible challenge, even for experienced developers, but you may surprise yourself if you try. In The Ray Tracer Challenge, Jamis Buck guides you through the process, but the code and tests are your own, in the language of your choice. There's plenty of room to experiment and make the code your own.

Also, A Swift Kickstart, Second Edition has been updated for Swift 5.0. If you already own a copy from us, this is a free update.

The Ray Tracer Challenge: A Test-Driven Guide to Your First 3D Renderer

The renderer is a ray tracer, which means it simulates the physics of light by tracing the path of light rays around your scene. Each chapter presents a bite-sized piece of the puzzle, building on earlier chapters and setting the stage for later ones. Requirements are given language-agnostically; it's up to you to translate them into tests and code using whatever language you prefer. When the project is complete, you'll look back and realize you've built an entire system test-first.

There's no research necessary—all the necessary formulas and algorithms are presented and illustrated right here. Dive into intriguing topics from fundamental concepts such as vectors and matrices; to the algorithms that simulate the intersection of light rays with spheres, planes, cubes, cylinders, and triangles; to geometric patterns such as checkers and rings. Lighting and shading effects, such as shadows and reflections, make your scenes come to life, and constructive solid geometry (CSG) enables you to combine your graphics primitives in simple ways to produce complex shapes.

Play and experiment as you discover the fun of writing a ray tracer. Accept the challenge today!

In print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/jbtracer.

A Swift Kickstart, Second Edition: Introducing the Swift Programming Language

Here's what's new in A Swift Kickstart, Second Edition:

• This is the Swift 5 / Xcode 10 release.
• For the Pragmatic Programmer pdf, the navigation bug has been fixed.
• I've added a mention of Raw Strings to the print() section.
• One of the custom operators was changed from >>> to |> as it is now widely accepted for piping forward. >>> is still used for function composition.
• I've updated the flatMap material to use the new name compactMap for the one that was renamed.
• All of the code has been tested in Xcode 10 and on Swift playgrounds.
  

For sale at pragprog.com/book/d-dsswift.

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