Re: Best books for people changing fields?

In article <2ae484tv81mji949jvmj6s0k1l63uvo1es@4ax.com>,
Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> wrote:

>
> >Self-publishing is a real schlepp--AES (Prof. Siegman) went that route
> >for "Lasers", but I don't have the chops for the job (and anyway I'm
not
> >a past president of the Optical Society, which probably helps with the
> >distribution issues).
>

Thanks for the mention, but I didn't actually self-publish LASERS.

What I did do was "self-typeset" by preparing the entire manuscript as a
TeX source file (not the figures or illustrations, however; it was still
too early for that).

The finished manuscript was then turned over to the publisher,
University Science Books in Sausalito, not as a typed ms (there never
was one) but as a standard DEC-tape.  Final copy editing was done on
screen by the publisher's freelance copy editor (who was also a
warlock), sitting at a DEC-20 timeshared terminal.  May have been the
first large professionally published book ever typeset using the newly
emerging capabilities of TeX.

Actual typesetting was done with the irreplaceable assistance of Don
Knuth, as a contract job for the publisher, using a professional-grade
typesetting system Knuth had in the CS Dept basement at the time.  Net
result of getting away from conventional typesetting was a massive cost
saving, especially for a modest-sales-volume technical book, making its
price per page at the time it came out less than half the price per page
of the average technical text at the time.

If anyone wants more gory details of how this was all done, they're in

<http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/How_I_wrote_LASERS.pdf>
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