About the Author

I've always been fascinated by writing. In my childhood days in the 1950s and 1960s, I often stayed up far past my bedtime reading science fiction. Even in adulthood, in my off-hours I'm more likely to be found reading a book than doing anything else.

After college, I got into programming more or less by accident; I was working for an actuarial consulting firm and was selected to take charge of programming on their time-sharing terminal because I was making much less than most of the other employees. Finding the programming itself to be more interesting than the actuarial calculations, I decided to become a professional programmer.

Until 1984, I remained on the consuming side of the writing craft. Then one day I was reading a magazine article on a programming-related topic and said to myself, “I could do better than that”. So I decided to try my hand at technical writing. My first article submission (to the late lamented Computer Language Magazine) was published, as were a dozen more over the next ten years.

But although writing magazine articles is an interesting pastime, writing a book is something entirely different. I got my chance at this new level of commitment when Harry Helms, then an editor for Academic Press, read one of my articles in Dr. Dobb's Journal and wrote me asking whether I would be interested in writing a book for AP. I answered, “Sure, why not?”, not having the faintest idea of how much work I was letting myself in for.

The resulting book, Large Problems, Small Machines, received favorable reviews for its careful explanation of a number of facets of program optimization, and sold about 20,000 copies within a year after publication of the second edition, entitled Efficient C/C++ Programming.

By that time, I was hard at work on my next book, Who's Afraid of C++?, which was designed to make object-oriented programming intelligible to anyone from the sheerest novice to the programmer with years of experience in languages other than C++. To make sure that my exposition was clear enough for the novice, I posted a message on CompuServe requesting the help of someone new to programming. The responses included one from a woman named Susan, who ended up contributing a great deal to the book. In fact, about 100 pages consisted of email between Susan and myself. Her contribution was wonderful, but not completely unexpected.

What was unexpected was that Susan and I would fall in love during the course of this project, but that's what happened. Since she lived in Texas and I lived in New York, this posed some logistic difficulties. The success of my previous book now became extremely important, as it was the key to my becoming a full-time writer. Writers have been “telecommuting” since before the invention of the telephone, so my conversion from “programmer who writes” to “writer” made it possible for me to relocate to her area, which I promptly did.

Susan and I were married in 1997, and have been writing together ever since.