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Was it this? Computer Programming Techniques: A TutorText

TutorText books are a bit difficult to find. I couldn't even find a cover image. On the plus side, I found a dirt-cheap copy of the one above on Alibris It might be worth the risk to pick that one up.

I'm not currently in the US, the book isn't for sale here, nothing by him is in any library in the country (as far as I can tell from a couple searches), and Amazon wouldn't ship his book here.

Lots of Slashdot readers are non-US, myself included. Strangely I don't find that any limitation.

I am not personally familiar with regards to South America or the Middle East and Africa, but I'm guessing it's available via South Africa at least. Otherwise in 2 minutes I found new copies available from UK, Germany, and Australia. Hint, try meta-search sites for books such as http:www.bookfinder.com, AddALL, www.abebooks.com and www.Alibris.com.

Your accusations of vitriolous seem very harsh of someone, whom by Slashdot standards is being mature and respectful in his criticism. Other than in some no-fault divorce states or provinces, the law does seem to place an a priori burden on male (husband) in regards to both financial settlement and parental access/rights. I agree that divorce is something that is always emotional ugly as like most civil or family court manner, both sides view themselves as having been wronged, and too often there is little or nothing in the way of unbiased confirmation of either parties' claims.

My experience has led me to believe that it is not a binary choice, but a reasoned mix.

It boils down to making it easier to do the 'right' thing, and harder to do the 'wrong' thing.*
As a parent, you learn fairly quickly when a verbal 'No!' works, and when it will not.
Punishment, or 'harder to do the wrong thing' does not have to be consistently verbal or physical, but you are so very right as to needing to be immediately applied to form the association.

While I understand we consider ourselves more advanced and enlightened than other species, we are still part of the animal kingdom, and subject to the same survival enhancement hardwiring shared by most mammals.

For an interesting experience, just watch a mother/offspring group(or family/pack/herd) behavior. The mothers and/or adults are quick and decisive with meting out 'discouragement' of unwanted behavior on the youngsters.
Does not matter if it is a herd animal, predator, or opportunist, it's pretty consistent.

*Technique popularized by an old retired cowboy(life long career) named Fay E. Ward for 'breaking'(training) working ranch horses. He was by no means the first, but he spread the word to his peers effectively.

Big companies make these mistakes from time to time. They salivate over a goal. They see a picture of what they want, and they'll engage MILLIONS of dollars to attain the dream.

Sadly, while obsessing on what the company wanted, it never did a reality check, "Does this deliver the dream of the consumer?" -- was never asked.

We saw this with the CueCat, DIVX, and the Zune. Amazon got suckered into paying some third party to create this device with the hope that bunches of people will pay them $9.99 for books. That isn't any dream I've had in the past 30 years.

It solves several pain-points for the company (shipping, printing, etc.), but not much for the reader willing to shop used book stores.

Seth

I messed up his name Marxist. "Les Giblin" is the name.
Here is a link to some of his books.

http://www.alibris.com/search/books/author/Giblin,%20Les

You can find Dale Carnegie books at Amazon or any other place.
Dale Carnegie:
* How to Win Friends & Influence People
* How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

These are the big two. I found others to be less useful.

Dale Carnegie has courses too. They are expensive (about $1700) but are life changing. I saw a dozen shy or awkward or mildly anti-social people all grow through incredible growth over the duration of the 12 week course.

I am introverted myself and found the course very helpful.

They focus on building confidence, techniques for remembering things, how to hold an enjoyable casual conversation with a new person, and how to talk in front of groups of people. The last is important for this reason-- if you can talk in front of 40 people, you will never find a smaller group as intimidating again.

Good Luck man!

I make another prediction: within 10 years, if Borders is still in business, you will be able to order a used book through them at their B&M store. They will cultivate a stable of online used book dealers to supply them.

(I recall a clerk once telling me that they received directions from corporate about which books were to go in which display windows). But buying books from customers requires lots of on-the-spot decision making, and that is incompatible with their corporate culture.

his job is to continue to leverage his single stroke of phenomenal luck - being at the right place at the right time a few decades ago - to sustain the ongoing illusion to the unwashed masses that he is some kind of unparalleled genius, and by extension, that microsoft is the beginning and end of computing.

The Perversion of Knowledge:

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail .jsp?isbn=0813342805

and

Science in the Third Reich:

http://www.alibris.com/search/detail.cfm?chunk=25& mtype=&qisbn=1859734219&S=R&bid=8761280764&pbest=& pqtynew=&page=1&matches=10&qsort=p

or

http://tinyurl.com/e8en8

Anybody who doesn't get that a government bending scientific inquiry to fit its doctrines is a Bad Thing should read these. Effin' scary. (As an aside, anybody who believes that Reagan or even the US as a whole as a major/necessary component in bringing down the former USSR, should also read the first reference above. That government was so internally conflicted and confounded on its own merits, it's a wonder it didn't implode sooner through sheer dysfunctionality. But I digress,...)

No wonder this guy's so crafty, he used to get kids out of trouble with flash pots and prayer.

In addition to the Zinsser book, which I will secure in moments from my favorite online book store, I highly recommend "Simply Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English?" and "A Civil Tongue," both by Edwin Newman.

Both also sadly out of print, but I did find a link here.

They are no longer the only game in town. And we really shouldn't positively reward this kind of behaviour.

Personally I have had great experiences with alibris, but that's just me, I'm sure there's other alternatives out there...

You need a perimeter defense weapon. Remember those autonomous turret guns in Half-Life? Those radar-directed and fully-silenced tripod cannons in Congo? Those robot sentry guns in Aliens? Imagine coupling Reason with an autonomous motion-tracking turret!

With a solution like that, your loved ones can sleep soundly while anything that moves is instantly tracked and ventilated thanks to the wonder of modern computers and depleted-Uranium slugs!

You need a perimeter defense weapon. Remember those autonomous turret guns in Half-Life? Those radar-directed and fully-silenced tripod cannons in Congo? Those robot sentry guns in Aliens? Imagine coupling Reason with an autonomous motion-tracking turret!

With a solution like that, your loved ones can sleep soundly while anything that moves is instantly tracked and ventilated thanks to the wonder of modern computers and depleted-Uranium slugs!

I would say without a doubt that it has had a profound effect on the way I think about programming and CS as a whole. It's about CS only as much as it is about logic, math, puzzles, reasoning, music, philosophy, and life. It's one of the most well-worn books in my library, and reading it always renews my passion to learn, to explore, to see CS as a road that's worth exploring, not as just a quick way to get from point A to point B.

For an entertaining discussion of escape velocities and an illustration of why you can't just keep piling the fuel into a rocket and expect it to ever take off (the law of diminishing returns) see Robert Heinlein's classic work The Man Who Sold the Moon .

Nobody knows what lies on the Road Ahead.

This book?

I might have another link if that one doesn't work for you.

Or than Arthur C. Clarke invented the space elevator. Much praise though Foundations of Paradise (1978) deserves.

At my college, it was a dollars-for-points system. They didn't even adjust the points to some wierd scale to mask the ratio: $1.06 paid in advance on the meal plan was worth $1 of cafeteria food. Also, no refunds on remaining balances. What a ripoff! So, we found ways to balance the ledger: anything that could be eaten before stepping up to the cash register *was*. We'd guzzle 'Free' refills on soda. Or misidentify items to the clerk (Nah, I only ordered a medium).

To stay on topic, I haven't seen mention of Dover books. Had 3 times that a prof used a dover book ($8 instead of $65, one time). Also, Alibris.com is DA BOMB for used books. Getting last-year's edition can save you some money. Bookswaps: primo. A friend at a bigger University can sometimes find used texts cheaply (or get them on a full-semester checkout from their library!), if you're one of 6 students in a junior/senior class in something obscure. Back before the September that never ended, I even bought a book or two off Usenet.

Oh, and a particularly lame Pascal textbook (in the 1980's) that priced out at 16 cents a page? I photocopied it ALL, then took the book back for a refund. Strangely, doing this just once cured me of being cheap. For ten bucks, I learned, I could have a smaller form factor, a hard binding, and a 2nd color used for highlighting key details that the photocopies lost.

See? College teaches you all sorts of useful things. Only a few during class, though.

When I go looking for an out-of-print Science Fiction title, I often end up with a volume discarded from a public library. Sometimes I remember seeing the very volume in my own public library, and passing it by. Gives one pause.

More ontopic: of all the SF writers I've read, the one who most deserves broader recognition is Richard McKenna. Not a towering literary talent, but still a imaginative and insightful storyteller. He's obscure mainly because he went and died just a few years after he began writing full time. His best-known work, The Sand Pebbles, is not Science Fiction, but nevertheless is the kind of story that will appeal to SF readers, full of technical detail, culture clash, and social speculation.

Stanley G. Weinbaum, most famous for the story "Martian Odyssey", a very early pulp writer who created an amazing array of alien life and worlds. Get his old "Best Of" Del Rey book (Alibris has some here).

The prolific Naomi Mitchison, who wrote in many genres, wrote two of the best scifi novels - "Memoirs Of A Spacewoman", which is a catalog of alien contacts with a memorable main character, and "Solution Three", an amazingly prophetic future history novel. She is spot on about genetic engineering in particular there.

Lastly, the horror master William Hope Hodgson, who along with Robert Chambers influenced Lovecraft and that whole movement. While "House On The Borderland" has stayed in print for a long time, "Boats Of The 'Glen Carrig'" (personal favorite) and "The Night Land" have only recently come back into print as library editions. Get them before they go under for another 20 years.

Half-Price Books is not nationwide, but does have locations in eleven states (WHQ is in Dallas). As a fellow Columbusite, I second FMC's complimentary post. As with most used book stores, though, you have to purchase what you can get when you find it, 'cause the next time you visit, it might be gone!

Here in the United States...not...enough emphasis on science and mathematics in... schools... With religious fundamentalists clammoring about ... Evolution ... We need ... free journals for the masses... media outlets (scientific or otherwise) will publish only what they find interesting and what they know will sell instead of what may be most valuable... should thus be treated before making any moves towards a grass-roots movement like this. After all, breaking down nuclear physics (like string theory) or techniques of treating cancer (like inhibiting angiogenesis) loses something in the translation when forced to use 6th-grade terminology.

Duke, you lost me at the first sentence. You're modded 5 and I still couldn't/didn't read you. Whitespace. It's free. It's not fattening. It's not against anyones religion that I'm aware of. Either hit return or toss in a few <p> tags. Seriously, until I hit the paste button and went to work with the dots, I DIDN'T READ YOUR POST.

Now, chances are you just misposted plain text as 'html formatted' and got burned, but your post shows a bit of what is wrong with scientists versus the media:

Having a good message isn't enough to DEMAND attention. You still have to sort of 'market' your message. Don't blame the readers if the message is unappetizing. That's like criticizing people for preferring filet mignon over gruel.

I'm a physicist. I'm told regularly that I'm a great teacher and writer. In other words, I communicate ideas well. You just didn't. Ignoring (for a moment) the substance of your post, you failed to communicate effectively. Tech journals largely fail, too. And it isn't a matter of dumbing down the language. Einstein said it best when he said that anyone that couldn't teach their ideas to a twelve-year-old was a charlatan. While I suspect he was 10% wrong (some brilliant people can't write well), most people don't try hard enough, but blame the world for not seeing their brilliance despite it being mired in goopy writing.

From what I've seen, a good researcher is rare. A good teacher is equally rare. A good researcher that can communicate cleverly and remain technically precise is rarer than a thunderbolt on a blue-sky day. Feynman's Freshman Physics lectures to CalTech are a damn good example. That said, even for the 1 in a million that can do these things well, crisp writing takes lots of extra effort. It isn't worth the effort when writing for an audience of knowing peers, which means PhysRev shouldn't waste it's time trying to be Discovery For Kids.

(Yeah, I ignored the whole tarpit of overpriced peer-review-journals on purpose. Many go there, none return).

Next, you say we should fix other stuff before fixing the issue at hand. I say work on them all at once:

• Demand more of the media. Complain and ridicule writers of goop or out-and-out wrongness.
• I do think we're gaining ground in terms of the quality of science writing and writers' ability to balance readability and technical correctness. This belief comes from asking my non-techie, non-scientist friends and family.
• I'd like a primetime engineering company show instead of another one about lawyers. I'd say this was more boring than watching paint dry based on my day, but I know how lame most lawyers' days are and look how little that matters to TV writers. I'm willing to risk the (well-known) back edge of this two-edged sword just to improve respect of science and engineering and gain a venue for day-in, day-out presentation of smart science, good engineering, etc. As much as ER creates armchair doctors, it also repeatedly reinforces the wisdom of consulting experts when needed and gives the profession added public respect for it's hard work.
• We need more science-for-poets/politicians courses taught well to nonscientists to gain their trust and respect. Otherwise, people that flunked algebra are going to be making tech policy without our advice. Anyone wanna bet on Senator Disney^H^H^H^H^H Hollings' science grades?
• We seem to finally be exploring populist mechanisms for making science/engineering cooler and more relevant for students.

As for the lack of whitespace in your post, it could have been worse. ItCouldHaveBeenTheEvenMoreFrighten ingLandOfNoWhitespaceAtAll. Hungarian Notation meets flamewar.

And we all know there's only one thing worse than that... no, not all lowercase and no whitespace... Worst of all are those really big german adjectives. Like the one for this tank

Yeah, I know...this started out screaming to be modded offtopic, troll and etc. I've edited the hell out of it since then, so now I'm on point. Still, I'm not grabbin the karma bonus, but I'll at least sign my name 'cuz this stuff matters and I did try to be funny. Whadda I know, it's 4 am... well, it was when I started. Now, it's daylight outside.

There is an interesting book called 200% of Nothing: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy.

I believe it is out of print, but it is available from Alibris.

(The parallelism between 'illiteracy' and 'innumeracy' is interesting.)

Quite so. In fact one might say it's a rather unfortunate side-effect of being British. I would venture to say that within that milieu there are shades of subtlety that would be lost on the typical brash overstimulated American, who for the most part has no appreciation for understatement, having beaten his head against life for so long.

And your so-called point is what exactly? :-)

OK, so while we're on the topic of amusing British things, I am reminded of the fact that if you want to buy up all of the works of Wendy Cope, you can finally do so from Amazon.com directly. It used to be the case that you couldn't get Cope at all from them (only from Amazon.co.uk or from Alibris if you wanted to save money on shipping and the currency conversion.

And, for you Philistines who don't know Wendy Cope from a Page Three Girl, just buy a copy of "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" and find out. Once upon a time, my review of this book at Amazon.com was both accurate and well-regarded:

There once was a poet named Wendy,
Who I desperately wish would befriend me.
For her out-of-print rhymes
I would give my last dimes,
But Amazon thinks they're not trendy.

OK, so it was well-regarded by everybody except one Brit who got his nickers in a twist over the fact that I titled my review "the most enjoyable book of English poetry ever written!". Evidently, excitement and hyperbole are not very much appreciated in England these days, where Tony Blair is apparently considered to be a pretty wild guy...

I don't know the history of this idea, but the book Mind Transfer (1988) by Janet Asimov was about the exact same thing - building a robot to hold you "self" that lived on after your biological body died.

I checked this book out from our local library a while back. It details how to build a 'catalog Mac' of the 68k variety. You still need some genuine Apple parts, though.

You might try Alibris - the author is Bob Brant.

They have a few copies for sale-- most of them overpriced, IMHO, since they deal with such outdated hardware. You might get inspired by it, but I doubt you'd actually want to build the machines he covers in the book.

First I would like to say that I love your novels. One of the great things about your writing is that in one genre you run the full spectrum of style. I particularly like the Tarot series, and wish you hadn't had such publishing problems which killed it's chances at becoming more popular. I especially love how in your books you often take a little time to inform the readers of what you are doing, and how you are doing it. You are one of the people that motivated me to make the leap from reading to writing, and for that I thank you.

As for my word processor of choice, I have not used StarOffice, but I currently use OpenOffice 1.0.

My question may be a bit off topic, but I am more interested in the current state of author to publisher manuscript submission. Do publishers still ask for hard copy, or do you now send an electronic file via email or other means? I would venture to guess it might be a mixture of the two, so if you do send an electronic copy what type of file format do they insist upon? I know OpenOffice supports saving different file types, so I assume StarOffice does as well, but has this ever been a dilemma to you?

Thank you for your time Mr. Anthony, and have a nice summer in Florida^D^D^D^D^D^D^DXanth

Let me first state that between books and magazines I probably spend about $300-$400 a month. When I travel the stores I check out are CD and book stores. When I go to New York my travel itenerary basically consists of arriving around 10 a.m. on Sunday, parking in front of Academy Records on 18th Street, getting breakfast and showing up when Academy's doors open thereafter filling my car's trunk with used CDs (relax oh keepers of the digital copyright--Academy is almost all classical and opera CDs, which rank very, very, very low in the Napsterizing and CD-R world. Find me someone that has copied Schabel's Beethoven recordings and traded in the orginals.) I then proceed to the Strand bookstore on 11th (?) & Broadway--a half-block sized warehouse of used and remaindered books. Then onto St. Marks place, for further used CD and used book purchasing. Then on to the West Village for more of the same. Oh, and if I get done fast enough, I can stop at Princeton Record Exchange on the way home.) Anyway, to make a long story short, I'm 33 and the only difference from when I was 10 is that back then I was riding a bike around instead of a car and I was riding around Hollywood, FL instead of NYC.

The reason the Writer's Guild's petition is so ridiculous is that used books shopping has been the regular course of behavior for book collectors back a few generations. Find me a real writer that didn't spend most of their pre-royalty check days trolling used bookstores and, likely, working in them. Particularly genre writers, who live in the places.:)

It was riding my bike around from store to store twenty years ago that I found the Lensmen and Skylark series by E.E. Smith, back before I realized they were unreadable. ;) Harlan Ellison's stuff, Phil Dick's surreal novels, Asimov, Clarke etc. etc. etc. When I got interested in politics, there for a buck a copy were Ted White's presidential campaign books, Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, history books by the hundreds.

I rememebr times my backpack was so weighed down with used books that I had to be careful turning corners that I wouldn't tip my bike over.

Used book shopping is completely ingrained in the book collector's behavior. Suggesting that used books be driven off of amazon is like suggesting that people shouldn't buy in thrift stores because of all the jobs it costs poor textile workers, and think of the manufacturing jobs lost in North Carolina when people buy used or antique furniture!! It's just silly--go to any writer's place and were did their books (at least the non-promotional copies) come from? Used bookstores.

Amazon's practice of selling used copies side-by-side with the new copies isn't even a new idea. Jeez, Powell's in Portland, OR has been doing it for decades--Amazon probably got the idea from Powells.

For anyone not familiar with Powells (and if you aren't you shouldn't be posting on this topic anyway): the fellow that owns Powells opened a book store in Portland after his son opened a store in Chicago. Dad didn't know much about selling books, and didn't know that used books are supposed to be shelved separately from new books. So he shelved them together. He also couldn't see how multiple used copies could be priced the same--the more copies that show up on the used shelf the less desirable the book, so each extra copy should be priced a little less than the one before it. So Dad went on his merry, stupid way. The main Powell's store now takes up a city block in Portland, burrowing its way through the existing buildings on the block in such a fashion that they publish a map of the store to guide you around its catacombs. Powell's and Strand are the Meccas of the East and West Coast for book nuts.

Amazon's sales look to me like just the Powell's system brought online, which makes some since as Powells is one of the online stores Amazon competes against. Other online used book sources are the Advanced Book Exchange, bookfinder and alibris. ABE and bookfinder are searchable databases of used bookstores around the country, which albiris is a (sometimes pricey) centralized fulfillment warehouse where people send their used books for sale (also used book sellers that have gotten tired of running stores or going from flea market to flea market just put their inventory there for sale.) I have purchased _many_ books through Powells and bookfinder. Too bad Portland is a little far from Philadelphia--wandering around the store is a great time.

Anyway, I've rambled on and on, but one final point, and it has been made earlier in the discussion--unlike digital media, there is no cost-effective way to duplicate printed media while turning the original into a used store. When you see a book in a used store, or on amazon's used lists, it means someone has deemed the book disposable and is relinquishing all interest in the book. Same as a table, or used car, or sofa, they're giving up the whole thing and the buyer has the only instance of that copy running back to the original purchase. The point? The only way used sales can make a dent in new sales of the work is if a large enough percentage of previous purchasers deem the book disposable and not worthy of keeping. If enough purchasers of your book believe it isn't worth keeping, then maybe you should loose out on some royalties! After all, I still have those Phil Dick and Harlan Ellison books I bought when I was 12 (nothing a 7th grade teacher likes more than seeing a student reading "Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled" during study period). I still have the same $2 used Book Club Edition copy of Lathe of Heaven I bought years ago after seeing the PBS movie. (Too bad I loaned the Lensmen books to someone that never returned them, and then bought the new printings last year when I was then old enough to realize they were unreadable!) The idea that someone who doesn't want a book should be stuck either a) throwing it in the trash or b) using it to get the fireplace started is offensive. Better the book should be taken to Ye Used Booke Store or sold through amazon to someone that want it.

By the by, I checked amazon and, for example, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which sold 60,000 copies just from Amazon pre-orders a couple of years ago, has a grand total of 72 copies available used--.12% of just the number pre-ordered from one source, amazon. Guild member Judy Blume's Blubber, which the Judemeister has been earning royalties on for 26 years, has a grand total of 22 used copies available. I think Judy's gonna make the car payment without a problem from amazon.

It looks like the same author has some newer books with fun titles, too.

Or you could work where I work ... we are fortunately low on PHBs. (frantically looks around for wood to knock on)

There are several copies of this tome on Alibris, a good site to hit when you're looking for out-of-print goodies. Looks like the price range is fairly wide, depending on condition.

I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Friday came out when I was in high school, which would be in the mid-80's. A quick check at alibris shows an unread, signed, first printing edition for the low, low price of $492. Friday is probably my favorite late-era RAH novel, but he was using other people's ideas for some of the BG.

I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Friday came out when I was in high school, which would be in the mid-80's. A quick check at alibris shows an unread, signed, first printing edition for the low, low price of $492. Friday is probably my favorite late-era RAH novel, but he was using other people's ideas for some of the BG.

I loved A Deepness in the Sky, but A Fire upon the Deep was probably one of the best and most innovative SF books I've ever read. Vinge's Across Realtime is another great book (actually a collection of three shorter stories).

'Hard' SF has dominated the Hugo's in the past and will probably continue to do so. Cryptonomicon was just too real. How long after the book was published did we hear about Sealand and their data haven?

For fatbrain fans, try:
A Deepness in the Sky
A Fire upon the Sky

For out of print books try alibris.com

You could also try Alibris - I have no experience with them myself...and, of course, you can always order through the link given above for Amazon.CO.UK.

I've enjoyed Ken McLeod's other books but haven't read Star Fraction yet.