Here are two nice articles that explain, for example, why the sinc filter is exactly what we want when deciding what color to make our pixel. I find them both fun to read and helpful for understanding intuitively what is going on here.

Blinn, J. F. (1989). What we need around here is more aliasing. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 9(1), 75-79.

Blinn, J. F. (1989). Jim Blinn's corner-return of the Jaggy (high frequency filtering). IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 9(2), 82-89.