u/Zydak1939in r/GraphicsProgramming • Recommends
On “Made a path tracer in C++ and Vulkan.”
Well, u/TomClabault made a list of some resources recently. If you're just starting out, I can also recommend you this video, it's really easy to understand. Then there's PBRT, but I found it pretty hard to follow when I was just starting out, so I'd save that for later. Scratch a Pixel also has a couple of articles on statistics and shading in general. As for research papers, there's really no trick, you just have to take your time reading them a couple of times and understanding every word correctly. The implementation is usually the easier part.