JDuntemann

Actually, in some respects it was that book that made my reputation, not vise versa. I wrote it when I was just getting into second gear writing technical articles in the magazines. I was introduced to a book acquisitions editor at Scott, Foresman by my editor at PC Tech Journal in 1983, and he took my proposal on her recommendation.

Turbo Pascal's low price compared to most other compilers made it an impulse buy. $50? Why not? And word-of-mouth did a lot of the rest.

I was paid for that book four separate times, and made plenty of money on it. I want FreePascal and Lazarus to be better known than they are; hell, I want Pascal to just keep its place in that Great Big Bag o' Programming Languages.

One clarification: I have not yet posted a POD edition of the book, though once it gets a little more toward finished I'm sure I will. You can always print it locally if you want hardcopy.

It's about due, but until the publisher decides to update it, I don't get to update it. There are length issues: I'd like to spend another 100 pages covering 64-bit issues, but there's a hard limit of 600 pages on the book. I'd have to cut something else out, and that's a hard decision. When I get the call, I will definitely do an update, but when that happens, again, is not up to me.

I loved Pascal instantly because my first language was mainframe APL, followed by some weird in-house macroassembler that Xerox was using on its 8080-based business boxes. Compared to APL, Pascal is not only elegant but transcendent. Verbosity bothers me not at all (I used to write COBOL too) because I like being able to read and understand what I've written six months after I set it aside. You couldn't do that with APL, and I had a lot of trouble doing it with C.

As a few other people here mentioned, I'm creating a FreePascal edition of my ancient Turbo Pascal book, ripping out stuff that nobody needs anymore, like CGA graphics and TurboVision. (I believe that there's a Turbo Vision clone available for FreePascal, but I just can't force myself to learn it again and write about it, even though I was writing paying apps with it in 1993.) The book is free, and the current version (I tinker with it irregularly) can be found here:

http://www.copperwood.com/pub/FreePascalSquareOne--08-06-201...

I'm going to stop building the release date into the filename with the next release; just search for "FreePascal SquareOne.pdf".

I'm programming almost exclusively in Lazarus these days, a lot of it for the Raspberry Pi. At some point I'd like to write a couple of shortish books on specific Lazarus topics like databases, and once we get settled in Phoenix I'll give it a try.

BTW, my friend erbo told me about this thread, so I figured I'd stop in and say hi.

--73--

Jeff Duntemann K7JPD