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Dev tools · July 26, 2024

Ray Tracing in One Weekend v4.0.0

Since this is a major new release (three and a half years in development), I think this should be ok for Show HN. This release has lots of new material, fixes, and updates across the three books in this series. All three books are online and free, with accompanying code available from GitHub. Enjoy!

Ray Tracing in One Weekend v4.0.0 launched on July 26, 2024 with 69 votes, #853 of 5,184 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.

In plain words

Ray Tracing in One Weekend is a series of three free online books teaching ray tracing implementation through practical coding. The books cover the fundamentals of ray tracing graphics programming with accompanying open-source code available on GitHub. Version 4.0.0 represents a major update after three and a half years of development, including new material, bug fixes, and improvements throughout the series. It is designed for developers and programmers interested in learning computer graphics and rendering techniques.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

The Ray Tracing in One Weekend series of books are available to the public for free online. They are released under the CC0 license . This means that they are as close to public domain as we can get. (While that also frees you from the requirement of providing attribution, it would help the overall project if you could point back to this web site as a service to other users.) Hit any of the book cover images above to begin reading. These books are formatted for printing directly from your browser, where you can also (on most browsers) save them as PDF. I’ve taught many graphics classes over the years. Often I do them in ray tracing, because you are forced to write all the code but you can…from raytracing.github.io

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