Ian Darwin is a long-time UNIX and Java developer, writer and lecturer who has written close to a hundred magazine articles, four books (one's nearly out of print, one's only online, and the third and fourth are still selling), one UNIX-specific CD-ROM compilation, a University-level credit course, three four-day industrial courses (each accepted by the American Council on Education for two semester hours of University equivalence), and dozens of presentations and short courses.
I believe that you can't explain something well unless you understand it deeply. I do not believe in the dichotomy between Training Development Experts and Subject Matter Experts, either in writing or in teaching. Somebody who knows all about teaching and nothing about a given technology, can go and ask the Guru questions all day, but they still won't really understand. They won't "get it". And neither will the students.
Since there weren't many Java work opportunities when the Alpha release of Java came out May, 1995, I began working on my own freeware application. It was called JabaDex, a nominal tribute to Java(tm) and to Rolodex(tm). Although it is not by any means a good example - I made many mistakes early on - you can see it in action, or download it, from this web site. It's currently around 7,000 lines of Java source code divided into some 70 source files.
In addition, I have written around five hundred short demo modules in Java, to learn how parts of the technology work and to show others how parts of it work. Some of these were included in my Java programming course, and almost all are included in my Java Cookbook (or at least in the source download for it)..
I have been writing and lecturing about Java since 1995. My first Java-specific magnum opii were a pair of Java Programming courses for Learning Tree International. The courses were pretty good, suffering primarily from trying to fit everybody who wanted to learn Java into one (eventually two) courses. They've since simplified these courses to be suitable for a wider audience. I still teach the courses, and do quite well at it.
I've also written a Java book for O'Reilly&Associates. The book is The Java Cookbook, and is similar in size and format to their existing Perl Cookbook. There are be chapters on, oh, just everything you need to know about Java, except the basics of the language. Think of it as "Java 201".
In the fall of 2001, more specifically September, you would have found me teaching (and relaxing) aboard GeekCruises' Java Jam, a cool cruise around the Caribbean accompanied by a comprehensive program of Java seminars.
UNIX has been and remains the operating system of choice for technical professionals. I have used UNIX since around 1982, at the University of Toronto, at SoftQuad Inc., at home, and at several consulting clients. I've written hundreds of UNIX programs - system accounting, networking, data conversions, text formatting and printing, and others - with an emphasis on making them portable among different UNIX variants.
I have also written extensively, churning out over seventy-five article on this system alone, for publications as disparate as MicroSystems/Micro/Systems Journal (not the Microsoft magazine with a similar name), Sun Expert (later Workstation/Server Expert, now out of print), and the Linux Journal. I also wrote a four-day "UNIX tools" course for Learning Tree.
I wrote a huge UNIX book that was never published. I contracted with O'Reilly to write an OPEN LOOK Edition of their X Window System Users' Guide (Volume 3 OPEN LOOK in their series of large X11 books). Unfortunately, it took longer to write than anticipated (like 90% of books, and the other 10% are by liars :-)). I delivered the final manuscript to Tim O'Reilly in person the same week Sun announced their switch to Motif and the effective demise of OPEN LOOK as a commercial GUI, so the book was never published. For those who do prefer the OPEN LOOK GUI over what one wag called "Motif's uglified version of MS-Windows 3.1", and I know there are still quite a few of you out there, the book is available for free download, along with the two volumes of XView Programming.
For C programmers, I long ago wrote a little O'Reilly book, Checking C Programs with Lint, that was in print for twenty years: not a record, but noteworthy. The Lint book arose out of my experiences porting USENET source programs in the early 1980's, and in developing and teaching an undergraduate credit course entitled UNIX, Software Tools, and C for Computer Science students at the University of Toronto.
As per my "writing requires doing", I keep my hand in the UNIX camp by helping work on the coolest UNIX-like system around, which is as everybody knows OpenBSD, the pro-actively secure UNIX-like system. I use OpenBSD at most of my consulting clients.
The best way to reach me is by emailling my first name and our domain. Or use this contact form.