One of my heroes, perhaps my greatest hero was Rich Stevens. The other day, someone posted a link on reddit to a Salon article about Stevens published a year after his death. It made me remember my huge debt to him.
Throughout my career, I’ve been known as a networking guy and most of what I know about the field I learned from reading Stevens’ books. If you’re interested in networking and haven’t read the 3 volumes of TCP/IP Illustrated, your education is incomplete. When you finish the series, you will have a thorough knowledge not just of the theory, and the API calls involved but of how things actually work. You’ll understood the actual code behind the protocols because that’s what the books are about. As you read the BSD networking code, you’ll see the results in the form of TCPDUMPs of the resulting packets on the wire.
But more important, I learned two other things from him. The first was an appreciation for the aesthetics of beautiful typesetting; of how to produce beautiful documents and books. Stevens’ mechanism for that was the Unix Troff typesetting system and he inspired me to learn and use it myself if only in a pale imitation of his mastery. I’ve since moved on to using LaTeX through Org-mode but the principals remain the same.
Second, he showed me what great technical writing is supposed to look like. My two books are explicitly modeled on his. Again, I never achieved his mastery but he gave me a goal to strive for.
I remember, vividly, the day I learned he’d died at the shockingly young age of 48. Fortunately, his wisdom lives on through his books and his Website that’s still maintained. If you want some great advice on producing great looking documents, take a look at what he has to say about it on his Website.