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Jon Shemitz - Publications

I've written a lot about programming over the years - my .NET book is just the most prominent recent example. People sometimes ask why I keep writing, especially when programming pays so much better. I usually say something about advertising, because that's the best short answer, but there are several good reasons to write. For example, it does tickle my vanity to be published, and I do like to feel like I'm paying forward for all the technology I take for granted. But as my pieces got longer and deeper, I found rewards that take more than a glib sound bite to explain.

"I write to find out what I think" - it's one thing to use a technique, it's quite another to explain it. Most of my Delphi and Turbo Pascal magazine articles focus on some technique that I used in a program or three and thought might be generally interesting. Having to explain things in a linear sequence and to write clean, stand-alone sample code means that I have to ground things in first principles, not the ad hoc accidents of the way I happened upon them. Sometimes I find that I don't quite know what I'm talking about, and thus I learn a thing or two in the course of writing.

Writing solo books brought out an aspect of writing that I really hadn't appreciated before. Where programming is full of places where Good Enough is really all that's appropriate - code that will only be exercised once or twice a year, for example - in a book, everything's visible. That is, Good Enough really isn't good enough. There are always a few places where I have to just move on - but for the most part my .NET and Kylix books represents many man-months of the best that I can do. This is a great feeling ... I do expect that I will write a third book.

Finally, writing books keeps me current. I have to identify topics that a working programmer needs to know and will find difficult to learn, and then I have to learn them well enough to explain them clearly. This deep understanding lets me solve customers' problems quickly and efficiently, without charging for research and rewrites.

Created on October 15, 1995, last updated March 23, 2006 • Contact jon@midnightbeach.com