It holds a special place in my heart as well. In 2002, my parents gave me a book "Multitool Linux" [1] which wasn't a spectacularly well received one, containing a mix of wildly different topics, but this was exactly what I needed as a teen experimenting with Linux for the first time. One of the chapters was about POV-Ray, and I remember being amazed with this newly-discovered canvas. I spend hours looking at images others had created and wondering how they'd pulled it off. I think I never got much further than rendering small animations on my (if I recall correctly) 400Mhz pc. Good times.
(As an aside, I'd completely forgotten the title of the book, although vaguely remembering the cover and time frame. It's so hard to find older stuff using Google when only having some vague descriptions. I found it by remembering that I read a book review years later and after some digging around could locate the review back to https://www.linux.com/news/book-review-multitool-linux/ based on the style of writing, which I remembered. I must have read that book to pieces. The chapter using Wireshark was also amazing to me.)
My interest in POVRay helped me in my high school math classes: I was really into making animations in POVRay and at the time I was in calculus and it really made parametric equations "click" for me.
(As an aside, I'd completely forgotten the title of the book, although vaguely remembering the cover and time frame. It's so hard to find older stuff using Google when only having some vague descriptions. I found it by remembering that I read a book review years later and after some digging around could locate the review back to https://www.linux.com/news/book-review-multitool-linux/ based on the style of writing, which I remembered. I must have read that book to pieces. The chapter using Wireshark was also amazing to me.)
[1] https://books.google.be/books?id=g0CPF6MEFcUC&printsec=front...