Murphy's Law of book publishing

Once the book was all proofed and the camera ready art produced, and once I had the color separation for the cover all produced I was ready to order the first run of books which was approximately 1000 copies.

NRI Schools sent me a check in advance for these books.  How can you beat that?  So I sent everything off to Whitehall Publishing and waited nervously.

A couple of weeks later several heavy boxes arrived.  So exciting!

I cracked open one of the boxes and grabbed one of the fresh books.  What a neat thing to hold the result of so much work in my hands.  This really looked just like a book that you would buy at the store.

And then... I opened the book to the first page and my heart sank.  The very page had a spelling mistake.  I misspelled the word congratulations.  :-/

It read Congradulations.   What?  How could I miss that?

Ah well, it was still a great day!  :-)

Liberty BASIC book preproduction

In addition to actually writing the Liberty BASIC book which involved developing the tutorial examples and explaining them, creating a quiz for each chapter, developing and proofreading each chapter, etc. There was the matter of producing camera ready pages.  They needed to be a certain size and they wanted crop marks on the pages.

NRI Schools also wanted a full color color, which I really didn't know how to create.  A friend of mine named Robert Gerami actually helped me with the graphic, and he even added a funny cartoon to the back of the book.  The cartoon was of a building with a sign saying "Programming School" and there was a hot dog stand outside the building.  A character with a fishing rod up on the second floor was trying to snatch a hot dog from the vendor's stand with his fish hook!  It was a humorous way to polish off the book's cover design.

There was a local company that created the acetate color separations for the cover, and all this went off to a company called Whitehall Publishing.  They charged me approximately $6 for each copy of the book when ordered in 1,000 or more.

All I needed to do now was write the check and wait...

Writing a book was more than I bargained for

I really had no idea how much work this was going to be.  I had good starting material with the Liberty BASIC tutorial, which had actually been fashioned into a spiral bound book which I produced at the local Staples store, but this had to be more polished.

I had no serious word processing software.  This meant that I needed to use the Write application that came with Microsoft Windows.  The only strengths that this provided was that it was essentially free, it was easy to understand and didn't burden me with any strange gotchas that full blown word processors often do, and it allowed page footers.

This was hard work.  The process was to produce a draft of a chapter, print it out and then I would lay down on the carpet with a pencil and read it, marking it up as I went.  Then I would go back and enter in all my changes and repeat the process several times until that chapter seemed good enough for the book.

This took weeks.  By the time I was done, I was determined to never, ever do it again.  Of course this didn't end up being my last book.  :-/

NRI Schools and my first book

About this time I received a phone call from someone at NRI Schools, McGraw-Hill Continuing Education Center which was a popular adult education company.  They told me that they were developing a new computer programming course and they wanted to base it on Liberty BASIC.  Wow!

Here's what they wanted to do.  They would write their own course, which would be a staple bound series of books that they would distribute to their students.  They also wanted an actual official Liberty BASIC manual from me for which they would prepay me.

This was to be a perfect bound book with a full color cover.  I had never done such a thing before, so I had a lot to learn.  It was very helpful that they were willing to prepay for the first 1000 copies of the book because otherwise I was not going to be able to bankroll this project.

I decided that the book would be based on the tutorial that came with Liberty BASIC.

This was going to be a lot of work, but it was very exciting!

Books I didn't buy

Before there were big book stores like Borders or Barnes & Noble there was The New England Mobile book fair in Newton. This could hardly be considered walking distance from my home growing up in Needham, but I had made the trip on foot a couple of times as a kid with my brother Ernie. Now I made the trip more frequently since I had a car.

This store was really just a big warehouse, poorly lit, and not very well organized. However this was the largest collection of books for sale to be had for miles.

I remember clearly two books that I browsed there that I didn't buy but which left an impression on me.

One was called A Small C Compiler, by James Hendrix. Not the famous musician, of course. ;-) I read just enough of the book to appreciate its biggest idea. Once you write enough of a C compiler in assembly language, you can use that C compiler to write itself! Like I said I didn't buy the book, but I learned important ideas from just browsing through it.

Another book was call Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation. This was a tan and blue hardcover. I can't say I really understood at that time what I was looking at, but it was interesting enough that I didn't forget it. In more recent years I did find a copy of it used and now am a proud owner. Smalltalk is a terrific language this book explains in wonderful detail how it works. Nowadays the entire contents of this book can be read for free online.

How I met the transistor

When I was perhaps 11 years old my father brought me home a book, and what a book it was! It was a red covered paperback titled Transistors, and I think it was published by Tab. The book was a perfect introduction to semiconductors for the neophyte. It was peppered with cartoon characters and helpful diagrams. The wonders of doped germanium and silicon were laid bare. PN, NPN and PNP junctions, holes, valence electrons and more all demystified. I already had a basic understand of what a transistor was, but until I read this book I really had no idea how they worked. The book blew the door wide open!

This was obviously a well written book to be suitable for an 11 year old to grasp and the information has stuck with me even after all these years. Thanks Dad! Now where did I leave that book?

Artificial Intelligence and BASIC

When I was 13 or so years old I bought a book at You-Do-It Electronics titled Experiments in Artificial Intelligence for Small Computers, authored by John Krutch. This book influenced me in important ways. It teaches the essentials of AI so anyone could understand it. Examples are presented in the BASIC programming language. One of the examples presented is of the classic Eliza sort of conversational system. Not cutting edge research, but as a starter it gets the job done.

I was able to use the techniques in the book to create demos for the computers at NEECO. The customer would ask the computer about itself, and the computer would try and respond appropriately with a demonstration of features.

The book can still be purchased used on Amazon.

Introducing BASIC

My first exposure to programming was BASIC. I didn't learn about BASIC in front of a computer. Instead, one of my older brothers (I have 5 brothers) left a programming textbook sitting around and I picked it up.

I enjoyed reading the book and I understood some of it. I didn't get to try any of the ideas from the book until at least a year later.

Interestingly I found a similar book at the MIT flea market http://web.mit.edu/w1mx/www/swapfest.shtml a couple of years ago. I purchased it soley for nostalgic reasons. The book is titled Computer Programming in the BASIC Language, by Neal Golden. It's a well illustrated book, with lots of flowcharting and examples. The typography is strange to me because all the code listings substitute a slashed zero for O and vice versa.