Suzanne Stefanac’s new book, Dispatches from Blogistan, is out. She’s a Well pal and you may have seen her name in the comments here. I haven’t gotten my hands on the book yet, but Suzanne’s blog gives an excellent taste; the glossary entries are particularly worth browsing. Good luck with it, Suzanne – try not to check your Amazon sales rank more than three times per hour!
If you frequent any online programmer haunts you may have already been exposed to the writings of Steve Yegge, a former Amazon.com software developer and a technical ranter par excellence. Yegge has re-published his rants, most of which were originally written for an internal audience of developers at Amazon, to the web at large. He urges people not to take them too seriously, but there’s a lot of truth in them. Oh, and they’re wickedly funny.
In 1981, I was 13 years old and teaching myself BASIC on my TRS-80 Model III from official Radio Shack manuals – accurate, comprehensive, and terminally bland.
Into that gray scene came the book Basic Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (edited by David Ahl of Creative Computing magazine). It changed my life.
I can’t remember now where it came from. Neither my parents, nor my friends, nor my teachers knew much about the home computer scene. It’s possible that I found out about it in Creative Computing magazine and ordered it by mail, or “borrowed” it from somewhere and forgot to return it. The book, subtitled “101 great games to play on your home computer,” was 8-bit-nerd heaven. Pages and pages of program listings in tiny, all-caps, dot matrix type, with brief introductory paragraphs. Plus, funny illustrations of strangely plausible robots. Don’t underestimate the appeal of the robots.
Ten years ago today was the public launch of Salon (as salon1999.com, not salon.com). I can’t say that I’m surprised they have lasted, because their work has consistently been excellent.
Through Salon’s connection to the Well I have gotten glimpses of how hard they have worked over the years, and I’m glad that it has continued to pay off in terms of editorial quality and reader respect, if not guaranteed solvency. (I know that predicting the hour of Salon’s demise is a fixation for some – mostly people who read second-hand accounts of SEC filings, as far as I can tell.)
I just got my copy of Joel Spolsky’s new anthology, “The Best Software Writing” (volume 1). I had read or heard of many of the pieces before, but it’s nice to have them in book form.
Somebody has already done the work of digging up links to all (or nearly all) of the pieces as they originally appeared online.