Thanks for the insights, and for illuminating the publishing process! The humor and irony are priceless, and it's really comforting to know that someone else finds the garbage just a frustrating as I do.
-- Eileen --, July 20, 1997
As someone in a technical job making way more than a book publisher would ever pay him, I have to say that I've been through the same situation. Unfortunately, I wasn't as persistent as Philip in insisting on a skinny book. (I had 200 pages of material, they insisted on 400 filled with illustrations).Unfortunately, I also had a day job that I refused to put down for the book, so eventually missed enough deadlines ( mainly because of the insane page count) that the book was cancelled.
A sobering experience, but a lesson well learnt. I wondered whether getting a book published would make me feel better, but now that I've seen what Philip's been through, I doubt it.
Congratulations, though. I'm going to buy a copy just out of sympathy!
-- Piaw Na, August 8, 1997
Reading "The book behind the book..." answered most of my burning questions, such as, How did a book with a cover like this (i.e., not a cute animal) get to be so good? I can't help wondering whether the book would have been more successful with O'Reilly--it seems to me that philg's audience would zero right in on it that way, while I consider it a minor miracle that I found the book (in my local Waldenbooks no less!) at all with ZD as the publisher. OTOH, I suppose the O'Reilly folks would want to push Website, eh?Regarding blurbs, they had no net impact on my buying decision: if anything, seeing Dertouzos listed on the front page gave me pause. Robert Thau's blurb should have been featured prominently, in large type, instead!
Why did the book work so well for me? It's a lot like sitting down with your favorite nerd friends over a cup of coffee and getting the unvarnished stories of their trials, tribulations, and hard-won wisdom. In my experience, that's how most people learn and make decisions. Reading the book was the next best thing to meeting Phil and getting his story. Maybe even better, because I would surely lose the URLs I would scribble down on pieces of paper...
Database Backed Web Sites is a great book--right up there with Sendmail and Programming Perl. Maybe even better, though it doesn't seem fair to compare them. Thanks, Phil, for putting so much of yourself into the book and giving us the inside story, too.
-- Rob Szarka, August 15, 1997
Thanks for a great book, and mostly for illuminating how most computer books are written by people learning the topics contained, something I've always suspected :)I also like the above comment, were your book is compared to Programming Perl, a book that you denounce somewhere else, must make you feel warm and fuzzy.
-- Barry Robison, August 26, 1997
In the 80's I used to frequent the rather sparse nerd sections in book shops. The last McBook I bought was "The Complete C Referance", and it was. In the last 3 years I have regularly hunted through the mamoth editions of JAVA+++++, NT FOR LOSERS, etc in the vain hope of finding some useful information. I was worried that I'd fallen behind in the industry, as I can't be bothered reading the mindless bland crap which is being dished out. eg "Functions of EXCEL menu icons" Duuh Thank you for sharing your views on this issue. I will now continue to put my moral being at risk by sifting the uncensored, unsanitised information on the web. By the way, I assume you have read from John Steinback "Travels with Charlie" on the above subject.
-- Malcolm May, September 17, 1997
It is not suprising that you are unsatisfied with Macmillan's promotion. They don't know a good book from bad. I don't consider books published under the Ziff-Davis, Waite, and other Macmillan brands because they are almost universally "by idiots for idiots." On the other hand, I at least browse most Adison-Wesley and ORA books on subjects that interest me.
-- Jeff Emanuel, October 31, 1997
I agree with your point about computer book authors not distinguishing between the obvious and well designed parts of software and the hard/buggy parts. Some of the senior physicians who taught me did the same thing - telling medical students that all parts of the physical exam are simple and useful when in reality some are very difficult and/or convey little information. Badly designed software can make even brilliant programmers feel frustrated and stupid. In my eperience people who are good at using software applications have often just spent hours of trial and error. We need books like yours that honestly point out the good and bad parts and tell you when something is is not worth the effort.
-- Hamish Fraser, November 26, 1997
Reading these pages reminds one of how depressing the machinations of the "real world" can be. It reminds me of why I often seriously step aside from this electronic world too and want to give it all up. Then I remember how useful and alive it can be. I suspect my reaction is more also against technology and computers themselves. If only there were more books telling it straight, then more people might read them, then more people would see things as they are, then things might even improve! Well, I'll still keep hoping no matter how vain those hopes. Consider this, this type of stand you are taking is more than just about books/publishing/etc it is about the very foundation of society itself (which changes a lot more and more quickly than we like to allow ourselves to think). Now that you've placed yourself in a unique position to make a difference, please don't give up the fight!Best Regards
Si
aka SnowmanF
-- Si Bloomfield, December 18, 1997
Thank you for posting "The book behind the book behind the book..." I've just finished writing "The Busy Educator's Guide To The World Wide Web" and tomorrow it comes back from the printers. Originally I had two publishers that wanted me to write a book, but after all the restrictions, hassles and differences of opinion, I decided to do it on my own. Your comments about publishing were all so true. I loved reading them.http://www.glavac.com
-- Marjan Glavac, March 18, 1998
It was heartbreaking to visit Amazon after reading The Book behind the book behind the book and finding 40 *GLOWING* reviews of The Book and yet it is Out Of Print.The Emperor Has No Clothes.
-- Daniel Allen, October 6, 1998
A few days ago I saw a copy of the german translation of "the old book" in a local store. I'm sorry to say it, but the translation is very bad. I enjoyed reading the english online version very much, both for its technical content AND for the entertaining style of writing. The german edition is like one of those funny translation programs for Windows was used. I'm not in the translating business, but in my opinion there is more to translating a book than putting sentence by sentence and word by word into another language. I recommend the english book to everyone working in this field. I do not recommend buying the german edition.
-- Ralf Eichmann, November 20, 1998
Sorry to say I don't do database stuff, and haven't even read the web version. But one thing I know you're good for irrespective of the topic is a hearty gut laugh. Thanks, Philip.Chris Grantham: grantham@completebbs.com
-- Chris Grantham, March 28, 1999
One big advantage of dead-trees publishing is the ability to autograph one's work. When I was in Boston, I picked up a copy of _Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing_ from a rack at the MIT Press bookstore because it was advertised as "Signed!"Imagine my disappointment when I cracked the book open on my flight back home to San Francisco: Philip had signed the book but Alex hadn't. I suppose it's typical of Philip's egomania that he thought that this would be sufficient.
(I was glad to have the book despite this. It gave me more good ideas for web applications than I've ever had on an airplane before.)
-- Lawrence Hosken, May 11, 1999
I've been an avid reader of computer-related dead tree carcases for a while, and this article has changed my perspective. I've read the "Dummies", "Idiots", "Dolts", "Jerks", "Bozos", and "Knucklehead" series of books. I've gotten quite a bit of education from them.Yes, they're silly, and dumbed down, but most of them touch on the basics, enough to give an intelligent reader enough of a start to do some experimenting. However, most of the productive thigns I've accomplished, I developed on my own, or through other resources.
I typically spend $35-$50 for one of those ten pound wonders. I figure the author is making at least $5-$10 of that. Silly me. Now I know.
What do I expect for this $35-$50? Not much. the good part is that I usually receive exeactly that. I figure from each of these 600-1200 page behemoths, I learn 2 or 3 useful tricks. That's about it. At least I can later use these tricks to impress my clients and make a few dollars, hopefully getting back the cost of the book that taught me these tricks. Is this true of every one of these books? No way! Just an average. Some of the books were completely worthless, and others (rarely) are gems.
(I've always wondered why I can breeze through a 600 page computer nerd book in a few days, but a James Michener novel of the same size takes weeks to read. Again, now I know. Michener doesn't use 300 irrelevant screen shots and cute guidance icons, nor does he resort to 1.25 inch gutters and 12 point type... Sneaky. I'll bet there are a lot of really pissed off trees in the afterlife, knowing they gave up their precious fiber for some of the crap served up as computer books. And, no, I'm not an environmentalist. Just a realist. Hug people, not trees.)
I am reading "Philip and Alex's Guige to Web Publishing" right now (online). Philip has oopend my eyes, and at first I was going to simply send him the $1.50 and save a tree. On the other hand, his new publisher seems to be genuine about publishing quality, so I may support that whole chain by buying the paper version.
Either way, Philip, you've given me a far better education in the fundamentals of the web than the three bookcases (and several hundred pounds) of dead trees in my office have. Thank you.
-- Chris Mospaw, May 23, 1999
It didn't occur to me that second edition was just published. Anyway, last Sunday at Berkeley, I walked into a bookstore and seen a familiar photo glancing at me from the shelf. It's like meeting one of your favourite web pages in person. So now I have it, still reading it (3 hours past midnight, ouch!), and truly enjoy it. Great work Philip, you're a real MIT hacker.
-- Dmitry Kohmanyuk, May 26, 1999
I've been a fan of photo.net for a long time...First it was Philip's photographs, then his expert guidance and articles. Later, I stumbled onto his web-engineering work (including the online book).I started reading the book one afternoon while waiting for a compile to finish. I kept reading. I let my project slip. When my wife arrived to drive me home that night, I made her wait while I printed out the remaining chapters. I read all night.
I pre-ordered my tree-carcass copy from Amazon that night.
The next day (in fact most days since then), I've pushed this book on everyone around me who thinks they can or want to design web pages.
Of course, I read the "book behind the book" story and was distressed at the treatment Philip's first book received.
How exciting, then, to flip over to Amazon just today (10 June, 1999) and see that the book is ranked #570. It's good to know that a well-written book by someone I respect can climb to a respectable spot without appearing to sell out.
Kudos, Philip!
-- Dan King, June 10, 1999
Just so this section doesn't entirely reflect a spirit of happiness and light ...I've pushed this book for the past two months to everyone I know in the computer and web business. No one (execpt for me) has bought it.
I've mentioned the web site to all my computer and photography oriented friends. Only one has actually visited and used it to any extent, and most of his contributions center around darkroom and enlarging techniques -- a topic that photo.net does not really cover.
I followed the link to Creating Cool Web Databases just so I could see what a bad book on this topic looks like. The customer reviews on were either "great" or "bad." One of the "great" reviews posted the name of a web site built using the techniques espoused in that book. The result seems fairly attractive and workable.
I wanted to use Philip's Uptime service and software to monitor my web servers both locally and remotely, but it seems that there is no easy way to get them to pull a page from an SSL encrypted link. I wound up "rolling my own" software to monitor those servers.
I read and enjoyed a fair amount of photo.net, and, in gratitude, I decided to make a donation to Philip's favorite charity. In return, Philip sent me a gift of couple of lovely prints. Now a financially astute friend tells me that the contribution is not deductable since the value of the gift (based on the quality of similar photographic art) may be more than the contribution.
Sigh!
Still, I bought the book, read it, enjoyed it, and learned a lot from it. Highly recommended. Even more highly recommended is the web site: it's great. However, you're here already, so you know that.
-- Frank Wortner, June 14, 1999
Here is a description of my interaction with another publisher. For some reason they reinforce the notion that Publishers believe their Customers to be absolute idiots who are not to be cared for under any circumstances.How Not To Design Web Sites OR How Not To Ignore Customers
I bought the book "The Practice of Programming" by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. I have liked reading Kernighan and Pike ever since I learned Unix from their famous book of a while ago -- "The Unix Programming Environment".
At the back of the book, there was a URL that promised to have a site dedicated to the book. The site was http://tpop.awl.com. To call it hideous would be a gross understatement. All around the start page, there is a perimeter of useless graphic buttons about 3 inches thick. The meat of the matter is buried in the middle. The page took about 5 minutes to download over my modem line.
Along the lower boundary, I see an error message "No matching titles (catid() is empty)". As a buyer I wonder what catid() is and why it is relevant to my mission of learning more about this book, and finding a way to discuss it with the authors. I find it difficult to read a book if I do not first understand what message the authors intend to convey through their work.
I first sent off a missive to their webmaster. I got the webmaster's address from the "CONTACT US" button. It said that comments about the website were to be directed to webmaster@awl.com The email I sent was:
=====BEGIN===== As a long-time customer of Addison-Wesley, I must tell you that your web site is dreadful. Here are some problems I see:
(a) Way too many graphics. There are way too many graphics elements all over the place. If your web designers work on a LAN, it might seem very good to them. Ask them to try loading their own web pages over a 28.8K modem line. None of these graphics elements (other than the cover photo) actually add anything to the user experience. They are totally superfluous and only serve to annoy potential customers.
(b) Broken Links: I tried searching for "The Practice of Programming", a recent AW release. The link your search engine sent me was broken. =====END=====
About a day later, I got an autogenerated email. It said that the webmaster@awl.com account was getting far too many emails for them to process, and gave me a list of email IDs that I could try sending email to. Notice that they did not bother forwarding it themselves -- they asked their customer to retry the email.
I then thought that 'corporate communications' was a viable place to send email to. Accordingly my next email was to corpcomm@awl.com. Imagine then my consternation when I received an email from a certain 'Susan Stockman' which identified itself as an autogenerated message and admonished me not to respond. Apparently dear Ms. Stockman no longer works at Addison-Wesley.
By this time I had tired of sending emails. I decided never again to buy a book from a publisher that was so careless about customer service. First I am made to see an utterly clueless web page for a new book written by highly respected authors. Then the webmaster says that he/she is too busy to receive my feedback. And then I receive Susan's email.
A web site for a book should have the following:
A more elaborate discussion with the authors than a preface in the book would allow Contact information for the authors No graphics unless the graphics are somehow relevant. As a practising programmer, I don't have patience or time to download useless graphics A place to discuss the merits of the book (or lack thereof) in a free and frank manner A collection of hyperlinks where I can find more information about the ideas expressed in the book
I think AWL did itself a major disservice by printing the URL of the book's website on its back cover. Potential buyers might see the website, and dismayed by its poor quality, refuse to buy what is a fairly decent book.
-- Jagadeesh Venugopal, June 28, 1999
I read Philip's commentary on creating the book about six months ago, and it answered a lot of questions I had about computer books. In particular: why are they so useless? Since then I have thought of this commentary many times when I considered buying technical books.For the most part there is no way around teaching yourself new skills by looking up related specs, rfcs, web pages, faqs etc. and then just writing practice code. Sometimes you need a broad overview, in which case a dead trees book is the right thing. In general you are out of luck though - there are few well written overviews of this kind. Recently I found one of the rare winners, "Java Cryptography". Not remarkably, the tone of this book is almost identical to Philip's.
In general, the value of Philip's writing is in his tone. Informed, not condescending, no hyperbole or salesmanship, thorough, honest, blunt. That is what technical writing is all about.
-- Lucas Gonze, September 20, 1999
I recently arrived in Korea from the states, and have quickly become jaded with the whole military hangout scene composed of beer-can-on-the-forehead, tobbacco-dipping meatheads and whore house strips posing as topless clubs. To keep me from getting depressed, I've resolved to use this coming year for learning. Luckily, even though the phone lines don't work half the time, the camp library's computer section is useless garbage from the 70's, and I was told at the video store, which is replete with nothing but various MS 2000 books, that it would take four months to get "JAVA for Dummies" (I feel silly about trying to order that now that I read this page), I have a dedicated line to the internet 24/7. This provides a medium for acquiring the information and resources that I need to build my on-line magazine, my learning project for the coming year. It was such a great surprise finding Greenspun's site, after weeks of fumbling through cyberspace trash trying to find anything useful. I read "the book on the book..." to see if I would be interested in reading the book, and now I am not only interested, I am looking forward to it. I have a lot to say but I'll keep it short....I feel better having read about Greenspun's experiences with book publishers. Some years ago I tried publishing my poetry to no avail. I got replies from all the publishers saying they were not interested. One even sent a letter with some hilarious poems featuring the god Thor and some Hai Ku (useless, IMHO) which was meant to be taken seriously. This was discouraging given that I had spent a good chunk of what should have been college exam study time organizing and putting my poetry in WordPerfect 5.1 (does anyone know how to get a copy of WP 5.1, BTY? I had no foresight to save the files as text...Word does a bad job of transporting these files). I haven't written but two or three poems since then. It is even more discouraging to find Jewel's poetry, which reminds me of my own (don't laugh), on the front of the bookstore displays. Reading this page, however, has raised my enthusiasm for my decision to publish it on my own. Distributing art, which should be free, through established, mechanized channels is a contradiction, as is publishing a work about the web on a static, non-interactive medium. The most important people are my friends and family, who are spread out all over North America, and if they are the only ones that read it, it's o.k.As I was saying, I am glad I found this site, which is just what I need to get me started in the right direction. I feel like I can learn from this guy without snoring up a storm. I hope his books are as insightful and entertaining as his articles on photography and book publishing. (I also liked The Game, which I scored something like a negative thirty-something the first time and won on the second try. Lesson learned: lie to blonde bimbos when you want something from them...actually, I knew that already, it was just the first time I got any type of result by doing so). I would be willing to buy the ZD hard copy of the Web Whore (that's the title as far as I am concerned) with the bad cover and napkin graphics (after I read the on-line book), just to have around as a symbol of Individual Expression vs. Infrastructures of Greed. In time it will probably be a collector's item anyway.
-- David Guarneri, December 17, 1999
You mention that you did not want a cdrom included with your book. For those of us with slow net access (33.6 modem) I'd go buy your book to save me the 100MB download for Oracle8i. (Assuming Oracle would let you include it with a cdrom). Also, I have found Oracle's web-site to be one of the hardest to navigate. It took me about an hour to find where to download Oracle8i for Linux, maybe they ought to read your book.Now the praise: your book, webSite and ideas are all very good. Keep up the good work. I'll be spending the next few weeks devouring the content of your pages.
Thanks
-- Mick Timony, January 9, 2000
Everytime a friend or acquaitance talks about the possibility of writing a book, I refer them to this excellent source of infomation on what it is like to deal with publishers or editors from an author's point of view. There is nothing like honest first hand experience to make them aware of the possible pitfalls.Steven A. DuChene
-- Steven DuChene, January 9, 2000
What a magnificent attitude! The level of technical expertise, future insight and wry sense of humor, actually caused me to stay up for 2 hours to read "the book behind the book." Your humor, both in person and on the internet, is refreshing, very entertaining and actually keeps me inspired. ArsDigita and photo.net both are great examples to follow. If you have a chance, see Phil LIVE AND IN PERSON. You will get to meet Alex and if you are lucky, you may even be the guy from Harvard who lends Phil a lazer pointer while being surrounded at MIT. I enjoyed your lecture and continue to enjoy the pages and humor you and your HP serve. Thanks Terrence Boylan terrence@post.harvard.edu
-- Terrence Boylan, February 17, 2000
Having read the first few chapters of your book online, I like it a lot. I also found the story of the paper version fascinating - if I'd been thinking of trying to write technical books for a living, you'd have saved me a lot of trouble!One point regarding Amazon.com, whom you mention frequently. I've bought books from them in the past, but due to their abuse of the patent laws, no longer do so. I understand that not everyone regards their behavior as abusive, but many do, and I think it should be pointed out so that people can make their own decision on the matter.
-- Russell Wallace, June 19, 2000
I am going to keep my comments short this time.
In November 1999, I accidently stumbled upon photo.net while search for "SQL + Oracle + database + websites + help" on Yahoo! After spending more than three days nonstop trying to crank through all the readings(there were more to photo.net than just Phillips and Alex's guide to Web Publishing), I have decided to buy the hardcopy.
I went to the local Borders Book Store to find Alex's book(or Philips) before attending the one-day bootcamp in Berkeley. After searching relentlessly through every single section, I finally asked clerk for help. Together we found the book (i.e. one single copy) under the Web and Internet section. The outcome was no better than the B&N bookstores.
And that was only half of the story.
After the slash-dot effect, I went back to the local Borders bookstore again because my brother is flying back from Carnegie Mellon University, and I wanted to give him a book that will enable him to build a successful database-backed website, hire a Stanford M.B.A. to be the CEO, go public, make his millions, all in the time it takes for a non-geeky guy to have a decent relationship(one year and a half). After all, I am his brother.
Once again, I can't find Phillips and Alex's guide to Web Publishing. I went to the aisle, and asked politely, "I was wondering if you guys have a book called Phillips and Alex's guide to Web Publishing." The clerk fooled around on his terminal a bit and answered, "Yeah, we used to have this book. It's sold out. Do you want us to order it for you?" I did not want to wait. I was thinking about going on fat brain to get the book anyway. However I was amused someone else is interested in Philip's book. So I asked the clerk, "you know... I bought the same book not too long ago. I was wondering when was the last copy you sold?" The clerk answered, "we sold the last copy on November 26 last year."
It turned out I bought the last copy in the store 8 months ago, and they haven't order since. So much for the slash-dot effect.
-- John Lin, July 16, 2000
a student put me onto this saga, and boy do i wish i'd read it about 5 years ago. even then it was clear that direct-WWW publishing was a viable alternative and it is more true all the time.my book is Finding Out About, which i have been trying to push thru Cambridge Univ Press. for my detail, see http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~rik/foa/#CURRSTAT
anyway, misery does love company. authors unite!
rik belew
-- Richard K. Belew, October 24, 2000
a kind of a coffee table computer nerd book.Yes it is and very enjoyable too — after reading the web-page I went straight out and bought the book. Which proves that online self-publishing and dead trees can coexist.
But in that context not enough of a coffee table book in my opinion. The text is available on-line, and in any case the content is to be valued for more timeless qualities that a technical reference; so what I am paying for is the pleasure of holding a well made book in the hand.The cover is too thin and the pages are ‘perfect’ bound. A real coffee table book would be cloth bound at least. Even if Morgan-Kaufman can't be persuaded to do that the paper binding could be better. (it dosn't make a significant difference to the production cost, its a marketing problem; the public think the paperback should be cheaper.) For an example consider Photoshop 6 for Photographers (Martin Evening, Focal Press, 2001) same format and similar size, same need for quality illustration, similar price, but it is bound in signatures and has a heavy cover.
In the future people will go to the web for content, but continue to buy books for the pleasures of owning artefacts: but only if they are worth keeping.
-- David Clark, August 20, 2001
Bravo! I co-authored a book a couple of years ago about Oracle running on NT, and ran into the same clueless incompetence on the part of the publisher. People seemed to like the book (or at least they said they did), but everything you said was true (e.g., the desire to fill up pages with screenshots, the carping about deadlines, the revisions that made no sense, Word templates that felt more like a straitjacket, the wasteful CDROM, etc.).One of the first things they said prior to me signing the contract was that the book needed to be at least a couple of inches thick, so it'd look good on the bookshelf next to all the other books for sale. Sheesh. They used really big type, lots o' screenshots (against my better judgment), and even the paper the pages were printed on was extra-thick!
Now the book's out of print, which is probably for the better. I'm happy to have helped some people, but the finished product was far inferior to what it could have been.
That was the first and probably the last book I'll ever write. And I didn't get paid nearly enough for my trouble either. They did give me a nice Cross pen when I finished - yippee.
-- Mike C., January 25, 2002
When I saw the Philip and Alex book in my local Waterstones bookstore, I thought to myself, who is this arrogant guy who thinks his book should be filled with strange photos and not screen shots and charts. A week later my curiosity got the better of me and I bought it. Philip, I've read your book from cover to cover 7 times ( and even a couple of times I've re-read my favourite chapters on the web at work), it really is that good. A few months ago I sold half my useless old computer books on ebay, when I get round to selling the rest I'll do it on the website I built using the ideas and technology you introduced me to.
-- John Holroyd, April 14, 2002
I saw the comment trashing Addison-Wesley's site for The Practice of Programming. I don't know how many of the past four years it took to fix it, but the site is now ... ok.
The links all link, the code samples are there, the graphics are just the usual commercial boilerplate text-in-images, dumb icons, corporate wallpaper, and the book cover. There is a table of contents, part of the preface, and a sample chapter (I). There is a Web Resources item that points to the authors' own book page (the url I give above), which is only 2 clicks from actually emailing the authors.
And this comment may be worn thin with overuse, but I did actually hear it, and it does summarize pages of experience:
[Novice Tech Author] I am going to write a book.
[Experienced Tech Author] Oh, you want to make dozens of dollars!
-- Ephraim Cohen, October 17, 2003
Let's compare average lifetimes of CDs and URLs. If you'd put the CD in, it would still be working today, unlike your URL. If you'd given the keywords needed to track the page down with a search engine, that might have helped (c.f. fish.cx), but I'd still prefer the CD.
-- Tom L, January 25, 2004
I will leave most of what Simon Hayes said to be responded to by Dr. Greenspun ( and hopefully he does ). However I must say that the conversation he replicates sounds more like one of those episodes of a TV show where the characters fight over what happened and give their perspectives tainted by what they want to believe.His representation that "books without CDs in the back" was an idea way ahead of it's time, ( so there were no books published before CDs were invented? ) seems strange, given that virtually no book published by Addison-Wesley at the time had a CD in back. Many of these were considered "must read" books serious preogrammers. Authors include James Coplien, Scott Meyers, Bjarne Stroustrup. One of the books was "Design Patterns".
Finally, when he decided to compare Dr. Greenspun to Scott Hacker ( sounds like the programming equivalent of a porn name to me ): "There were some amazingly good other authors at that party, including Scott Hacker, who turned out to be a fabulous author and friend and went on to write some equally wonderful and far better organized technical books, also quite ahead of their time, ", I decided to check him out.
I couldn't remember any books by Hacker, so I checked Amazon where he was hard to find ( Amazon does not have a good Author search so I got hit with 5000+ books ). I then checked with Illinet, which is the online catalog of all books in most Illinois university libraries ( the notable exception being the University of Chicago ). It's URL:
http://library.ilcso.illinois.edu/ilcso/cgi-bin/welcome
I couldn't find even one reference to a book he wrote. Not one book in any of the libraries of most universities in Illinois? Strange for a writer "ahead of his time".
-- Thaddeus Olczyk, May 23, 2004
I've since come back to writing An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups, and handling entirely myself. This lets me keep the page count low, not clutter up the book with junk, and it turns out that it makes more than a few dozens of dollars. The entire experience is also much more satisfying, since you actually get positive feedback about the book. So much so, I'm writing Independent Cycle Touring the same way. It turns out that you can make money writing and selling books, but you have to self-publish.
-- Piaw Na, June 8, 2010