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I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s, when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the time, I could barely write a coher
by Zigurd 1y ago
I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s, when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the time, I could barely write a coherent paragraph. Before Stackoverflow and other online resources people were desperate enough to buy tens of thousands of copies. I made serious money off of that.
I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100 times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number of copies.
Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.
- WillAdams 1y agoDr. Donald E. Knuth seems to be doing well --- made enough to at least include a mention of what he did with his royalty checks in an index entry in one of his books (royalties, use of points to a page with a graph which resembles the pipe organ which he had installed in his home).
- bombcar 1y agoThere are always outliers (that's the whole point). All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.