Wednesday, 20 May 2009, 15:07
It’s now almost exactly two years since I started work on my book Coders at Work and I’m finally in the endgame. Once I get all of my chapters turned in I’ll probably do some work on the website and blog a bit about behind the scenes, making of the book kind of stuff.
Last updated 2009-05-20T15:07:53Z.
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“that book is dead sexy” —Xach on #lisp “The best book to read if you want to write real programs in Common Lisp.” —Dan Weinreb, ITA Software |
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“Absolutely amazing! A page turner, just like Harry Potter for the technically minded.” —Tobias Svensson “This book is so interesting I did 60 minutes on the treadmill yesterday instead of the usual 30 because I couldn’t stop reading.” —Joel Spolsky |
I am either a writer turned programmer or programmer turned writer. After picking up an undergraduate degree in English and working briefly as a journalist, I was seduced by the web. In the early ’90s I hacked Perl for Mother Jones magazine and Organic Online. I participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic and later taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. I am also one of the few second generation Lisp programmers on the planet and was a childhood shareholder in Symbolics, Inc. In 2003 I quit my job as the architect of a Java-based transactional messaging system to hack Lisp for a year. Instead I ended up spending two years writing a book, the Jolt Productivity Award winning Practical Common Lisp. My most recent book is Coders at Work, a collection of Q&A interviews with fifteen notable programmers and computer scientists. When I'm not writing books and programming computers I enjoy practicing tai chi. I live in Berkeley, California, with my wife Lily, daughter Amelia, and our dog Mahlanie.