Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

The Old New Thing

analysis
Jan 17, 20071 min

The other week, Raymond Chen's book The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows (Addison-Wesley, 2007, $39.99, ISBN 0-321-44030-7) arrived at my office unannounced. I threw it on one of the many piles of new books on the floor, and thought nothing more about it. A few days later, I noticed it on the pile when I was looking for something else close to quitting time,&nbsp

A few days later, I noticed it on the pile when I was looking for something else close to quitting time, and started browsing through it for a minute. An hour later, when my wife called to ask whether I was planning to come home for dinner, I was still chuckling.

Raymond writes a blog by the same name; the book is not exactly the blog. Yes, much of the material in the book first appeared in the blog, but it has been “substantially supplemented by new material better suited to book form.”

About half this book can be appreciated by a reader without programming background; perhaps two-thirds can be appreciated by any programmer. If you’re an old Windows programmer, like me, you’ll follow the whole book with interest.

Chen writes “Raymond actually remembers using Windows 1.0. Fortunately, the therapy sessions have helped tremendously.” I am right there beside him. Movable global memory that needed to be locked for use; discardable code segments: Ah yes, I remember it well. Not fondly, mind you, but well.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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