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I've been fascinated by programming for many years (wrote my first Fortran program in 1965 - a bouncing ball calculation), but when Microsoft's .NET Framework and C# came along in recent years, this longstanding fascination exploded. Besides C# and .NET, I'm intensely excited about object-oriented programming, extreme programming, unit testing, refactoring, and software design patterns. I wrote documentation for Microsoft Visual C++ in the '90s, then quit to write freelance.
Writing has also been my passion all my life, so writing a Dummies book was a great treat. I hope C# 2008 for Dummies kindles a love of C# and .NET in you as it has for me. And if you like the book, there's more on my Web site. The site is www.csharp102.info. (New book version just out: C# 2010 All-in-One For Dummies, with Bill Sempf.)
If the book is C# 101, the site is C# (and programming) 102, with examples, articles, tips, downloads, and more for "102ers" - I've aimed the site particularly at programming newbies (though more experienced coders may find some value there too), so it's a bit friendlier and less techy than many C# sites on the Web (though many of them are excellent).
The site houses permanent stuff like longer articles and code downloads. For example, since C# 2008 for Dummies didn't cover much on Windows Forms programming, the site features a multi-part article series on that topic.
Of course, I have a life, of sorts, too. I live in Colorado with my beautiful, talented wife, Pam, on a beautiful mountainside not far from Pike's Peak. I've been an avid cat lover for years. And I'm deeply in love with Italy - been there twice so far, in 1995 and 2001. The first trip stayed on the beaten track: Rome, Florence, and Venice, focusing on art. The second trip went into more remote places: the small town of Pavia, south of Milan, where we visited one of the sites where Hannibal trounced the Romans; the even smaller town of Passignano, which sits on the north shore of Lake Trasimeno in south Tuscany, near where Hannibal ambushed a Roman column and killed some 16,000 Romans; and Sorrento, a bustling tourist resort much loved by the Brits, on the Bay of Naples (no Hannibal connection, but we prowled through Pompeii and hung out on the Isle of Capri). We WILL go back.
I grew up all over the Western U.S., following my miner father as we lived in most of the western states, often in colorful, remote spots like Death Canyon, Utah, and the Lukachukai Mountains on the Navajo reservation in NE Arizona. My degrees are in English - M.A. in lit at New Mexico State University, and M.A. in rhetoric and linguistics at the University of Southern California.
