Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress's highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words "at work" suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone's feedback, we selected 15 folks who've been kind enough to agree to be interviewed: * Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow * Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang * Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google * Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger * Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! * L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 * Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation * Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal * Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer * Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler * Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX * Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI * Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress * Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX * Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker What you'll learnHow the best programmers in the world do their jobs! Who this book is for Programmers interested in the point of view of leaders in the field. Programmers looking for approaches that work for some of these outstanding programmers. Table of Contents * Jamie Zawinski * Brad Fitzpatrick * Douglas Crockford * Brendan Eich * Joshua Bloch * Joe Armstrong * Simon Peyton Jones * Peter Norvig * Guy Steele * Dan Ingalls * L Peter Deutsch * Ken Thompson * Fran Allen * Bernie Cosell * Donald Knuth

The author of Practical Common Lisp.

Peter Seibel is either a writer turned programmer or programmer turned writer. After picking up an undergraduate degree in English from Yale and working briefly as a journalist, he was seduced by the web. In the early '90s he hacked Perl for Mother Jones Magazine and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic and later taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. In 2003 he quit his job as the architect of a Java-based transactional messaging system, planning to hack Lisp for a year. Instead he ended up spending two years writing the Jolt Productivity Award-winning Practical Common Lisp. Since then he's been working as chief monkey at Gigamonkeys Consulting, learning to train chickens, practicing Tai Chi, working on his new book, Coders at Work, and being a dad. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Lily, daughter Amelia, and dog Mahlanie.