1. Overview

Ray Tracing in One Weekend (v3.2.3): 1 Overview

Ray Tracing in One Weekend is an introductory book on ray tracing written by Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch. This booklet builds up a physically based renderer through simple, incremental C++ implementations, and is available as open access at raytracing.github.io. The latest version at the time of writing is Version 4.0.2 (2025-04-25).

The English reference links placed at the top of each section in this document point to Version 3.2.3 (2020-12-08), the final release of the v3 series. Because the v3 series books are no longer available on the official site, a copy of the v3.2.3 tagged release has been mirrored on this site. Note that the chapter structure of the v3 and v4 series differs slightly.

We extend our gratitude to the original authors Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch for making their work freely available.