Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Bios usually are self-written (how would the publisher know the author's strengths better and be able to write about it better than the author themself?), and the whole point of them is to make the person look good to help sell a book (or whatever else). They're mini-resume's: the whole point is for it to be a sales-sheet, so yea, of course it's going too look like that. What do you expect? "Author Andrei is a mediocre programmer we picked up off some random street in Boise."
The fact is, I recruited Andrei when I spotted him at a freeway off-ramp holding a cardboard sign "will code for food."
Besides, if there are any programmers who have good reason to have an big ego (Which I certainly haven't seen in Andrei), then Andrei would certainly be one of them. And that's praise Andrei *didn't* write himself ;)
When I went to the ACCU conference last spring, they had a vendor room set up where people could sell stuff. One was a bookseller who was selling programming books. Prominently displayed was Andrei's "Modern C++ Design". This was published in 2001, 8 years ago. 8 years is an ETERNITY in this business, and for a bookseller to not only keep it in stock, but find it worthwhile to lug a box of them on his back to a conference along with a few handpicked other books speaks volumes about its quality.
