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.

I thank the original authors Peter Shirley, Trevor David Black, and Steve Hollasch for making their work freely available.