The book "Object-Oriented Ray Tracing in C++" is a practically oriented introduction to Ray Tracing. It describes how to build a ray tracing application based on a graphical class library which is introduced throughout the book and is provided on disk.This text gives a decent introduction to the basic ray tracing algorithm and some of the main acceleration techniques. The choice of the covered acceleration algorithms is very good. The book is clearly written and does guide the ready to a successful implementation of an image synthesis application.
But I do have some problems with this book. First of all, I believe that some of the mathematical concepts need to be explained in more detail for a reader unfamiliar with the material. Some of the implementation details remain a mystery and have to be accepted as they are and this makes the library quite hard to reuse in other contexts.
And I am quite unhappy with some of the C++ code. While most of it is written quite well, there are some classes that are just not implemented in an object oriented way, e.g. the class RGBColor is derived from the Vector3D class. While this is technically possible, it doesn't make any sense and it certainly is misusing the possibilities of object oriented programming.
Overall, the book provides a good high level introduction to building a ray tracing application, but the text could go more into details and the provided C++ library should be improved and follow the oo paradigm.
