“Fire in the Valley is the memory lane of personal computing’s early years… Reading like a high-tech Three Musketeers, but with characters out of Dickens by way of Popular Electronics… A book not to be missed, just plain good reading about the drama of the kids next door turning their dreams into millions.”
– New York Times

“Swaine and Freiberger capture the communal spirit of the early computer clubs, the brilliance and blundering of some of the first start-up companies, the assortment of naivete, noble purpose and greed that characterized various pioneers, and the inevitable transformation of all this into a major industry. Must reading.”
– Philip Lemmons, editor-in-chief, BYTE Magazine

“A complete and authoritative history. Great reading.”
– John C. Dvorak

“Much of the book could also be called ‘Those Magnificent Men and Their Computing Machines.’ Their portrait is of creative and caring people whose sense of adventure and curiosity weighs heavier than their pursuit of profit.”
– Los Angeles Times

“The first book to chronicle not only the technological innovation, but also the social legacy created by the true ‘fathers’ of the personal computer… a very human, sometimes funny and always articulate story of the industry’s otherwise cloudy origins. The pages are filled with the people, the projects, and the frenzy that built the personal computer industry.”
– Computer Currents

“Like indulgent gods, Freiberger and Swaine seem to love all of Silicon Valley’s children, but their hearts are clearly with the hobbyists and hackers, gifted weirdos and insanely curious oddballs, the ones they show us most clearly.”
– The Industry Standard

“I couldn’t put it down.”
– Steve Wozniak

Paul Freiberger and I just signed the contract to do the third edition of Fire in the Valley through the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

We released the April issue of PragPub on Wednesday. The contents settled during shipment and don’t exactly match the predicted contents. This means that the article on the Go language is still to come, but you’ll find an unexpected article by Jim Bonang on The Pragmatic Defense: Making Defects Easier to Find. Remember, PragPub is sold by weight, not by volume.

The April issue of PragPub goes out on April 4.
It will feature another article on the Scala programming language by Venkat Subramaniam and an article on Google’s Go language by Brian Ketelsen. Venkat wrote Programming Scala and Brian is writing one on Go.
There will also be an article on software viewed as piles of sand (it makes sense, really) by Zach Dennis.
And I’m interviewing Antonio Cangiano on technical blogging. Antonio’s book of that title just came out. (I was the editor.)
The magazine has regular departments, too: an events calendar, choice bits from the internet, a profile of one of the Pragmatic Bookshelf editors, and a regular column by John Shade.