The Attic — old stuff


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This is the attic.

Things you'll find here:

The Web Architect's Handbook
In 1994, I began writing a book about the then-new World Wide Web, for Addison-Wesley. It was already clear in those days that the web was going to be huge, although nobody had any idea that it was going to swallow the whole economy.

Unfortunately for the project, in early 1995 I went to work for FMA Ltd, probably Scotland's first web consultancy (and for the first year or so, technical support for Demon Internet's commercial web business). This caused the book to slide, so that it wasn't published until 1996, by which time it was trampled in the rush.

This book is now so thoroughly obsolete that it isn't even an embarrassment any more: it's an historical artefact. While I've discussed a second edition with Addison-Wesley, we agreed that it wasn't really practical: and it looks as if I'm not going to have time to follow up an alternative project (for O'Reilly and Associates).

This site contains the first three chapters, plus some supplementary essays from 1996-1998. When the book is remaindered/discontinued I will post the full text here (as a historical artefact).

Programming Perl/Tk
In 1997 I began working on a book about Perl and the Tk graphical widget toolkit for Addison-Wesley. Due to the departure of two editors, two corporate takeovers, and a pronounced loss of interest -- partly induced by O'Reilly and Associates bringing out a title on exactly the same subject -- this is effectively a dead project.

This site contains the first four chapters of the draft, which contain a whistle-stop tour of Perl 5. There's not much Tk material in this, but it may be useful to someone.

Psion palmtops
I used to be a devotee of Psion. No more. Here are some of my thoughts on their machines.
Older Perl stuff
Or, "gosh, did I really write that?"


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