Robert Binder

My first publication about information technology was as a high school junior - a short report about "Computers," a very exotic subject in 1966.

After working as a mainframe programmer for several years, I was frustrated by the absence of any useful documentation about debugging - in particular, about how to interpret a "core dump." I started collecting crib sheets from programmers I met, and using every bug I fixed as a mini research project. That evolved into my first book, _Application Debugging_. As word processing software at the time was prohibitively expensive, I wrote the book in long hand, delivered it to a typist, waited a few weeks, and then mailed another batch of manuscript pages to the publisher. I had the good fortune to work with Karl Karlstom of Prentice-Hall who provided encouragement over the four years it took to complete the project.

I published many other articles in popular and refereed (IEEE and ACM) magazines following that. About ten years later I was specializing in testing of object-oriented software. Collecting my articles about that into a book seemed like a good idea, and I didn't want to undergo another long publication ordeal. However, the draft of the collection was really awful, so I decided to start over and write a proper book. Seeking to broadly and usefully cover the subject, this project took on a life of its own resulting in another five year effort and finished product of 1,024 pages: _Testing Object-oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools_. I was very fortunate to have Boris Beizer as an informal project advisor and a great teacher on the subject of test engineering.

I've continued to publish in many other venues since then (see my blog site for a complete list.) As result of my writing, I've met many people and had technical vistas open up that have been highly rewarding. I'm truly grateful to my readers for that.