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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, for PostScript development, you got two Adobe books -- the "red book" reference, and the "blue book" tutorial and cookbook.

(I vaguely recall getting both of these Adobe PS books bundled by Sun for NeWS or OpenWindows development, maybe together with the traditional white&green Sun binders and/or the O'Reilly X books.)

I learned enough from the Adobe blue book to do some snazzy printing. (HP PCL for non-PS LaserJets, which I also did, wasn't as cool.) IMHO, PS was a lot of fun, and a good way to be exposed to stack-based programming. (Forth also looks like it'd be fun, but PS had the visual construction aspect.)

Looks like the blue book is available at: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF

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There's also a green book, on program design. Still have all three, mostly because of an inability to throw books away. They were so clear, as software documentation was before everyone created hyperlinked docs.

Surprisingly though, they came in handy somewhat recently (2017?) when I was tasked with re-writing some legacy publication software. A lot was boilerplate, but buried in the .ps output were some answers that no one could find anywhere else.

> a green book

Available at site above or via: https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/GREENBK.PDF

Anyone interested in learning postscript should also consider Glenn Reid's Thinking in PostScript. I think it is a better introduction than the blue book.

Reid is also listed on the title page as the author of the green book.

Glenn Reid's Green Book is to PostScript as Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth is to FORTH! Both classic excellent books on how to think like a native in the language.

http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

I had the same reaction after doing some PostScript last year, I wanted to go learn Forth.

Leo Brodie's book Starting Forth's good tutorial

Thanks!

You're very welcome.

For later exploration, JonesForth <https://github.com/phf/forth/tree/master/x86> is excellent exploration of Forth's internals.

There were quite a few Forth stories a month or so ago if want more resources.

Mitch Bradley (who's a Forth guru who wrote OpenFirmware) wrote a subset of Forth in PostScript:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/forth/forth.ps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

https://github.com/openbios/openfirmware

I get a chuckle out of a URL pathname of "offline". I wonder if everyone who acceses that is causing a tape robot to fire up

Indeed - and believe a green book existed documenting writing a PS printer driver.

Can't find it now but it's not the GREENBK.PDF available in link above, though might peruse that version

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