Get to know some of our talented authors featured in our author spotlights. Here you can see interviews, detailed biographies, and book summaries of some of the best in the industry.
BROWN: I was originally an IT Director for an advertising agency, and I have in the past worked for government organization, and I helped teach the BBC how to writer websites in the early days of HTML. For about the last 4 years I've been writing, and since January 1999 I've been writing full time. Most of my books focus on scripting languages (Perl, Python, PHP) but as an expert in cross platform integration I also make sure that my books cover and promote interoperability between Unix, Macs and Windows machines.
Visit my website at www.mcwords.com for information on the books I've written.
BROWN: Having interviewed my fair share of staff over the years using tests I'd written myself, writing a ReviewNet test seemed to be the logical next step to pass and make use of my experience both in managing HP-UX systems and in asking the right questions during an interview.
BROWN: I was working on porting free software projects like Gawk, sed, emacs and Perl to the BeOS operating system in 1997 when an editor at Ziff-Davis approached me about writing a book on porting applications to the new OS. From that I got talking to the folks at Osborne, and ultimately it lead to me leaving my full time job to work on writing instead.
BROWN: Well, I've actually got four titles in the process of making it to the shelves. CD-Recordable Solutions (Muska Lipman) is all about writing CDs and DVDs and includes practical guides to the process as well as guides on creating and organizing content, and using CDs/DVDs for backups and archiving. The title covers CD writing under Unix/Linux, Mac and Windows.
Perl to Python (Pearson/Addison-Wesley) is a book for Perl programmers that shows them how to migrate their experience in programming Perl to the Python language.
The upcoming Python: The Complete Reference (Osborne) is a complete guide to programming with the Python language, and Scripting XML with Perl, Python and PHP (Sybex) is a title devoted to processing XML documents with different scripting languages. Aside from the big three, we're also covering Rebol, Ruby, Tcl and AppleScript.
BROWN: Read everything I can get my hands on! I spend probably 2-3 hours each day reading news sites, magazines and technical papers to keep up with what's going on. If there's something really hot or important to cover then I'll sometimes take a few days off to learn more about the item in detail.
BROWN: I think the biggest challenge with any IT hiring project at all is to separate the people with knowledge and the people with wisdom. Those with knowledge might be able to quote and remember all of the arguments to a particular command, or remember the exact configuration of all their machines. It's a useful skill, but knowing how to apply that knowledge which is important.
For example, knowing the arguments to tunefs is a great help when you need to use it, but knowing when and how to use it are more important - you can find out the arguments you need using the man command or a paper manual.
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