The subtitle is "How to create, publish arid sell computer software", but if I were tempted to set up in the software business, I don't think I'd buy Meyer Solomon's book for its first half which more or less comes under the heading "how to have an idea". For practical information, the booklist at the back of the book and the sample contract for a software author are what I would find most useful. Another appendix, real-hie tales from two software writers, says as much as the rest of the book about being a novice in this business. Meyer Solomon was a founding editor of Computer Age magazine way back in 1979 and of Personal Computer World. I'd have expected a more solid book from him. The first word coming to mind was "waffle" - many a well-put, clever, entertaining proverb, but much waffle. Cut the opinion, what does the book actually cover? Know yourself, says Solomon's first chapter: what are you best at? Search out information, says the next chapter (short chapters), to get an idea of the market. Exercise your mind to generate ideas. Test your idea - a list of criteria. Then you might need a team to turn it into software and paper, a proper product with a jazzy name. Look at the market: what sector is ripe for you? Look at the software already out: what opportunités for you? Equip yourself you'll need a computer, and do nor put disks on top oi the monitor. Write the software: break it into modules that can each be tested; a third of the overall time should be spent on detailed planning at the outset, only a sixth to the actual coding and the other half to testing. Write clear and handsome manuals. Test your work yourself before approaching any publisher. Be prepared to give customer support for a long time after sales. Someone thinking of carrying through a software idea might find the most useful chapter in the book comes about two-thirds of the way through: an outline of the stages a piece of software goes through from proposal to testing to delivery, from the publisher's point of view. He spends disproportionate space on telling how to write plain English, and then damns himself by using the word "reify" in a chapter title. I had to try three dictionaries. (You try. Toot has the answer somewhere on this page.) And at seems he's never heard of producing a typeset page direct from the author's own disk we do it every day at AA. He devotes exactly two paragraphs to selling software by mail-order, a topic vita to mary would-be software sellers. All in all, the book of Solomon is a once-over-too-lightly collection of loose jottings. His favourite word is "incidentally"'. As he himself puts it in a parenthetical passage: "By the way, I have neither the expertise nor the space to go into various topics in fine detail." AA | 
