For any developer that has experienced Alias|Wavefront Maya, Bryce or Softimage and wants to take the dive into nitty gritty of rendering engines you will find no better guide. Matt and Greg comprehensively cover more than a thousand pages of content and for each topic, whether it be cylinders & spheres, the refraction of different materials or the antialiasing techniques and in each case they show - by example - how the mathematical theories are applied in practice and how to convert the models into C++ with plenty of hands on opportunities with the pbrt ray tracer. pbrt itself is fairly robust and includes a great set of plugins such as a Maya Exporter to export scenes from Maya in the pbrt format.
Also of mention - the book quality is top notch with plenty of quality full color images which do justice to the 3d shapes & scenes. The paper can be a bit thin and see-through but that is the tradeoff to make a book of this depth.
