Dan Gookin: The OG of Technical Writing! 🏆
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by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm

Dan Gookin (https://dangookin.com/) makes technical writing sound like both craft and service. He traces how a writer-first career led to computer books that felt friendlier, funnier, and more humane than the manuals around them, then explains why metaphor, timing, and respect for the reader still matter as much as raw technical knowledge.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8
A conversation with Dan Gookin | 1h 04m

ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION

Dan Gookin's influence on technical writing is easy to feel in this conversation, but the interview never drifts into empty praise. What comes through instead is a very practical understanding of why his work connected. Writing came first for him, technology second, and that order matters. He approached computer books as a communication problem, not an opportunity to perform expertise. That perspective helped shape a tone that felt friendlier, more relaxed, and more respectful of beginners at a time when many technical books and manuals seemed determined to keep readers at a distance.

A large part of the episode is really about craft. Dan talks about the importance of examples that are memorable instead of sterile, and about humor as a way to support clarity rather than distract from it. He is especially good on metaphors and on the moments when writing stalls because the right explanation has not clicked yet. His answer is not brute force. It is movement, distance, and letting the mind reset so the right comparison can arrive. That makes the work sound disciplined, but also deeply human.

The rest of the conversation broadens that craft into a way of thinking about technology itself. Dan recalls getting online early, learning through bulletin boards and modems, and discovering programming almost by accident while trying to build a writing setup. Later, he makes a strong case for books as reference tools that reward annotation, memory, and quick retrieval in ways video often does not. The episode closes on programming as a relaxing puzzle, which fits the larger theme perfectly: good teaching, good tools, and good curiosity all depend on making complexity feel inviting instead of intimidating.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT

- Beginner material works better when it respects the reader instead of talking down to them.
- Humor can improve technical writing when it makes the lesson easier to remember.
- The right metaphor often matters more than another paragraph of explanation.
- Older computing culture demanded patience, tinkering, and self-direction.
- Books still solve reference and recall problems that video handles less gracefully.

JUMP TO A TOPIC

- 0:00 - A Different Kind of Computer Book: Kirupa introduces Dan Gookin and the writing voice that helped make beginner technical books feel approachable. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=0s)
- 2:00 - Writer First, Technologist Second: Dan explains how a writing career led into computers and eventually into teaching beginners. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=120s)
- 11:00 - Why Dry Examples Fail: He talks about keeping technical writing lively, useful, and memorable instead of stiff and boring. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=660s)
- 23:00 - Metaphors Need Air: Dan shares how walking away from the desk often helps the right explanation finally come into focus. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1380s)
- 35:00 - Modems, BBSes, and Friction: The conversation revisits the slow, hands-on realities of early online life and learning by tinkering. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2100s)
- 46:00 - Why Books Still Work: Dan makes the case for books as fast, annotatable references that remain useful long after first reading. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2760s)
- 58:00 - Programming as a Puzzle: They close on the enduring pleasure of solving problems in code simply because the challenge is satisfying. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3480s)

TO LEARN MORE

- Dan's Website: https://dangookin.com/
- Dan's Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APZGIG

TRANSCRIPT

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

0:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=0s)

Hi everybody. Today I talk with Dan Gookin. Dan is probably one of the most prolific content creators and technical writers this planet has ever produced. He has written over 100 books, probably a whole lot more if you count his updated editions, which are often significant rewrites. He's also the creator of the For Dummies series of books. He had this radical, unheard-of, controversial idea that technical writing should be fun and playful, and it should not be condescending to the reader. The author's personality should shine through.

These are all things we take for granted today, but they were almost unheard of when Dan was pitching his earliest ideas for the first couple of books in the series. Given the influence that the For Dummies books have had, and their popularity, the rest is history. On a more personal note, his writing style was a huge inspiration for me, and some of his earliest books live rent-free in my head as perfect examples of what technical writing should be. This is going to be a really fun chat, so stick around, Dan. It is great chatting with you.

I have an introduction where I talk a little bit about why I'm chatting with you and so on, but I've been reading your books for a very long time. Actually, your work was some of the first I read when I was very young and just starting to learn more about computers, and that got me into technical writing and the whole world that came from there. So I just want to say thank you for all the things you've done, welcome, and I want to start at the very beginning. The same question I like to ask everybody I chat with is: how did you get started?

In your case, what came first: a love for writing or a love for technology?

1:36 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=96s)

Well, it was writing first. I wanted to be a writer, so I went to school wanting to be a writer, to write books and science fiction and all that stuff. For a long time I was writing articles and short stories and trying to do novels. I was getting really good responses from some magazines, where the editor would actually write me back personally. Then they would send me a letter and say, this is good, but we need something more along these lines. And then there was a local magazine in San Diego, where I grew up, called The Byte Buyer, and they were looking for people to write computer articles for them.

I had a computer and I liked to write, so I figured I would write an article about computers, and I did. I was first published in that magazine in April of 1984, and they liked what I did, so I kept doing more for them, and eventually I became the editor of that magazine. I also spent time working at a computer book publishing house, so I ghostwrote quite a few how-to computer books. That's where I started to learn the art of writing for beginners, and I learned that you had to be informative and you had to have humor.

I also loved Mad Magazine when I was a kid, so I tried to combine the two. For years I tried to sell the idea of a beginner computer book, something that would be friendly and approachable and say what people needed to learn about computers, because none of the other books were doing it. The publishers didn't want to publish a beginner's book because they said beginners didn't buy books. And I said, well, they don't buy books because you don't write books for beginners. Eventually we hit upon DOS For Dummies. A publisher approached me with the idea, and I said, well, I already have an outline for a book like that.

We melded the two, and the rest is history. It exploded. So that's where I came from. That's the three-minute version.

3:25 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=205s)

Yeah, I want to dive into some of these details first. So, 1984, people had computers back then. It wasn't until maybe even 10 years later, or around some of your first videos, that I remember seeing you do an interview for one of the local news stations about what you should look for in a computer, and there was actually a picture, I think, of you by the poolside on a laptop. It was like 1991. So I'm like, okay, you were way ahead of the curve, even for people who were ahead of the curve at the time. So what got you into using computers in the early 1980s?

3:57 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=237s)

Well, at college they had a computer, a big VAX, and there were terminals all over the place for the computer science kids. Then I found out that anyone could use the computers. Any student had access to the computer system, and there was a word processor on there. And I'm a writer. I had typewriters, and I would go through them and break them because I typed so fast or got angry or whatever. And I'm like, well, what I really want is a word processor.

I knew a lot of people around then who would say, oh yeah, writers are using word processors now, because you can cut and paste on the screen, move words around, and back up and erase without having to use White-Out or start over on the page. And at school they also had Apple 2 computers with WordStar on them, and I was like, well, that's what I want as a writer. So I bought my first computer as a tool to write with. The guy in the Apple Store was pretty rude to me, he wouldn't help me, so I didn't buy an Apple.

I went to Radio Shack and the guy there was nice, so I bought a TRS-80. I actually have the ancestor to one of them right back there. That computer was my writing computer for the longest time, and that's what I used to write on. But the problem was that, as a cook in a restaurant, I couldn't afford a complete word-processing system, so I only bought the computer, and it didn't even have disk drives. I was sitting there with this thing I had just paid a lot of money for, going, okay, what can I do with it?

Well, it came with a book, and the book was like: learn to program your computer. I didn't touch any of that in college because I thought it involved a lot of math, but it actually doesn't really, because the computer does the math. So I started reading this book on programming and I'm like, hey, this isn't that hard. It's kind of easy. While I was waiting to finish the rest of my word-processing system, I was playing with the computer. Then, for my birthday, my mom bought me a modem. That was kind of weird, because my mom's from that generation and they don't know how to use smartphones or anything.

But she went to Radio Shack and said, what can we get as a peripheral? And she got me a modem. So I'm online in 1982. I'm online and going around and chatting with people on what were called bulletin board systems back then, and that was pretty fun. I got to know computer-nerd friends and other programmers as I was learning how to program, and it was fun. And then, of course, the writing ended up tending in the computer direction because I could explain computer things in a manner people would understand, and it just kind of blossomed from there.

6:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=401s)

So when you talk about how your writing blossomed from that point of view, depending on what source I'm looking at, you have anywhere from over 150 to 200 books published over that period of time. How do you manage that?

6:57 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=417s)

Well, it's not that hard because if you look at the unique titles, and I can bring them up over here, there's a difference between writing a lot of editions and writing totally different books. I don't know what my number is currently, I will tell you in just a second, but when you write for technology, you're rewriting a lot. So if I can just grab a book off the shelf, we have PCs For Dummies, and this is what they call the 13th edition. As you write about technology, of course technology changes.

So this version of PCs For Dummies does not cover floppy drives, but the first version did, and the first version covered DOS, which is no longer used as an operating system. As computers keep changing, you have to keep updating the books. So a lot of my books are revisions. Thirteen versions of PCs For Dummies, 13 versions, is really one book updated 13 times. So is that 13 books or one book? The number of unique titles I have, the one-off books, is about 68. And a lot of those are programming books, but a lot are also about technology that doesn't really exist anymore.

Older books on Excel and Windows, a computer dictionary, a book on memory management back when that was a thing in the 1990s. Those are the unique titles. But the total number of titles, let's see if I can get the current number, is 175. So that's counting. If you count each time a book came in the mail and they said, well, here's the latest edition of your book, then it's 175, which does mean that I've published that many books. But it also means that a lot of them are rewrites. So you go through and say, hey, here's the new version. That's really a new book, but is it?

8:55 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=535s)

I mean, I got introduced to your work through PCs For Dummies. One of the first books I read was PCs For Dummies. I forget what edition it was. My Amazon history goes all the way back to like '97 or '98, but I'm guessing this was back when I probably bought it at Barnes & Noble itself, because every weekend my parents would take me there and they'd be getting coffee. That was a thing back then. I'd be jumping between video game books and technical books and so on. But of course, PCs For Dummies was the one I read and thought, I have to buy this. This is actually really good.

And what I really liked about it were the jokes in it because I was a kid and the humor was perfectly aligned for me. I don't mean that in any disrespectful way. I really liked that kind of humor. I think the one that always struck me, and I tried to find it today if I could find the quote, was. It was something about the Intel Pentium and the Oracle at Delphi, using all those terms from back then and very specific names of companies and technologies from that era. It is a core memory for me.

Even now I don't have the full context for it, and my memory has probably fudged it up a bit, but I know that in an attic somewhere at my parents' house that book is there, and I know exactly where it is. It was always a fascinating thing to me. And when I got into writing, for similar reasons, I was into animation and graphics and people would ping me about how to do things. Email was no longer scalable, so I started publishing on a blog.

I started in 1998, in middle school, and I was always like, I'm going to make mine just as funny as some of the Dan Gookin stuff, because it adds a human connection instead of all the boring material people saw from everyone else. So that was really fun. But in preparation for what we're doing here, I bought a more recent version of PCs For Dummies a couple of weeks ago, and that was very different. I realized it is the same book, but to me it was a complete rewrite in a certain sense. So over time, whatever was book A has become a brand-new book in its own way.

I'm pretty sure they probably did brand-new versions in the middle too, between the 20 or 30 years since the first time that book came out. So I think in that case, even though you're being humble and saying it's not a full rewrite, I think it is a whole new book, just the title happens to be the same.

11:02 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=662s)

There it is. And it's easier to write because you know what you're going to write about. You have the book there, like you said. But things change, the technology changes, and I don't like to reuse old material. I try to keep it fresh. It's hard because sometimes they want the book so fast that I really don't have time to think of something especially clever or funny. Still, I do try to keep the humor in there because it should be fun. It should be entertaining.

Back in the day you'd read a computer manual or a computer book, and the examples were really dry and boring, and I'd be like, oh, they still are. I have a book on SQL programming and here's a database that's a collection of users, and it's boring. So I'm always looking for things I can do that are more entertaining and fun. If someone looks a little deeper, maybe they'll say, oh yeah, there's humor here. Something's funny. Something's outrageous. They were a lot funnier back in the early days. The publisher gave me a lot more latitude to write silly things in there.

The original version of WordPerfect For Dummies, which I think is the best book I've done, back in 1992, had a lot of stuff in it that I would get in trouble for today. Nothing offensive, it was just silly stuff. Some of it. I got email from a guy who said, I am reading a computer book on the subway in New York and laughing out loud, and people are looking at me like what's wrong with me? Because it was funny. I tried to make it that entertaining, informative first, of course, but entertaining. In DOS For Dummies, for example, the section on recovering a deleted file has no humor in it.

It's just like, get the file back. They don't want to read a joke first. They want to get the file back, and then, after the file is back, I can tell a joke. So that's kind of the way I would do it. But I never really tried to force humor into the first draft. The humor usually comes during the second draft. I write the first draft, then in the second draft I can think of silly things to do. That's a lot easier, because to me it's easier to make fun of something than it is to start out trying to be funny.

13:17 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=797s)

That makes a lot of sense. How were you able to convince your earliest publisher to take a bet on this more humorous take on writing? Historically, at least my understanding is that the publishing industry is very traditional. They don't like to change too much, and especially back then, when you had a handful of players controlling a lot of the distribution, it was tricky to break in. It's hard to print, ship, store, and keep the warehouse from eating all the books and so on. So how did he pull that off?

13:47 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=827s)

Yeah. I still say to this day that book publishing is an 18th-century business that thinks it's in the 21st century, but they're just old in the way they do things. There used to be a computer book convention where all the publishers and authors would come, and it was in San Diego. At the time I'd written about a dozen computer books, and I was giving a talk from the author's perspective or whatever it was. And I said, one of the things I don't like about books is that when I write a book I try to make it fun and entertaining and creative.

But a lot of these publishers do what I call this: they take the book and put it over a creativity magnet, so all the good stuff gets sucked out and you're left with a dry, boring computer book. And I said I hate that. I was actually referring to a publisher called Cybex. I had just written a book for them, I forget what it was about, and the editor actually sent me an email saying, can you stop putting these jokes in your book? I just have to edit them out. The same thing happened when I worked with Microsoft Press, which I love, and I had a great relationship with them.

But they would do the same thing. You can't. They. They actually told me once, you can't put this thing in there about cops and donuts because it's not going to translate into German. And I'm like, why? That was their reason for pulling the joke out. So I'm complaining about this stuff, and in the audience is this guy, Mac McCarthy. He is the editor in chief of IDG Books, which had just started out. They'd maybe done a few books. He was the guy looking for an author for DOS For Dummies, and he said, hey, I want to take you out to lunch.

So we went to lunch at the hotel, and he said, I have an idea for a book and we're looking for an author to write it. I want a book that has personality and is fun and all this stuff. And I said, well, I'm your author, and I already have the book. I called it The Idiot's Guide to DOS. He called it DOS For Dummies. I sent him the outline, and from then on we actually changed the entire computer book publishing industry because all of a sudden the other publishers, like Cybex and Microsoft and the rest of them, were all looking for books that had humor in them.

Suddenly that became important. Now the publishers would say, we want a book with attitude, which I think is dumb. And I said, no, you want a book with personality. We read our favorite authors, whether it's Stephen King or whoever, because they're lively reads. They have personality, and you can identify with the characters. And I'm like, we can put the same stuff into computer books. You just have to let the author express their personality and find good authors and good writers who will do it. And they actually did.

I mean there were lots of guys, Andy Rathbone, Dee McLen, or if I messed up his last name, everyone calls him Deck, and a bunch of other good authors who had great senses of humor and could write really well and express ideas. They all put together these For Dummies books and they sold like crazy. Oh, David Pogue was another one, great sense of humor and a sense of fun too, and that absolutely came across in the books.

And so these books, Mac For Dummies, Windows For Dummies, PCs For Dummies, and DOS For Dummies, all became tremendously popular because the people who were bored to death with the old books suddenly loved the new books. It's like, now I finally have a computer book that I can read. It's entertaining, it's informative, and it keeps me going so I'm not just looking at chapter six. That's all I want. So yeah, I think the enthusiasm of the writer just.

17:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1051s)

Oozes out. In a lot of real-world teaching, the material can be dry and boring, but the teacher is excited and makes it engaging. You almost get better at understanding the material by osmosis because that excitement is addictive. I think the personality brought to these books made some of this material that much more useful because, yes, it's boring, but it's explained in a way where I can tell the person writing it cares about the material greatly, as opposed to just droning on and on about something. Yeah.

18:01 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1081s)

And when you find a book like that, it's like, yeah, I like this guy. I've done that several times. I've bought many technical books by authors I enjoy. And yeah, I think that's what really set the industry apart. Of course it only lasted a few years, because then they realized it didn't really matter what was in the book and they just kept printing more and more of them and diluting the content, which is just, well, it's capitalism. What can you expect? But I've always tried in my own books to keep the interest level up and make them fun.

In fact, I just got a comment after updating my Word book because there's a new version of Microsoft Word coming out, and the editor wrote me back and said, wow, you really make books fun. I really like reading them. And I'm like, well, thank you. You take time, you put thought into it, and you try to do clever little things to take a topic that would otherwise be boring and make it interesting.

Yeah, the nice thing about the humor is that even if you know the material really well, you still want to read it because you want to see what the humorous take on the material is going to be like. I definitely remember reading some of the Dummies books not because I didn't know how to use the product, but because I wanted a light read on an airplane or a train and wanted to see what the humorous take would be like. Because I'm a geek, I love technology in general, so getting reinforcement on material I already knew, but from a different angle, was totally fine with me.

From a business point of view it was probably a really good decision as well. And getting a belly laugh from a book while I'm reading about Photoshop or something, and then suddenly they have you do something funny, it's like, thank you for entertaining me instead of just telling me what it is. Step A, B, C, no, no, no. I want to have fun too. Let's make learning fun. And the For Dummies books were also interesting in that the design was very different as well.

19:51 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1191s)

If you saw a collection of books on the shelves in libraries or bookstores, they stood out, the yellow and the black and so on. Do you have any insight into how that came about?

20:04 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1204s)

Mac McCarthy again. He did research and found that the two colors that most attract the human eye are yellow and black. That's why caution signs are yellow and black, because psychologically we react to those colors. They're very strong, so he decided to make the book yellow and black. He was the one who added that. Originally, and they don't have them anymore, which again shows how they're tamping down on the humor a bit, they all had cartoons in them, which I didn't. I didn't like the cartoons, but people loved them. They loved the little icons. They loved the little dummies. Man, that was another thing that came along.

When I was writing DOS For Dummies, about two-thirds of the way through the book they came back and said, we want icons in the margin. And I'm like, what? So they sent me a book to show me what the icons looked like, and I came up with the four basic For Dummies icons: the technical stuff, the tip, the warning, and remember. And the technical stuff. One of them has what they now call the Dummy Man on it, and the Dummies Man is actually a caricature of the graphic artist who designed those icons. His name is Peepee, and if you meet him in real life he looks like the Dummies Man.

So that was basically him. I got to meet him once when I was visiting in San Francisco, and he was really funny. He was also really surprised at how well the books were doing, and I'm like, well, that's you. And he's like, yeah, that was me. I drew myself as the technical nerd guy, and I thought that was really fun.

21:38 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1298s)

Great. So every writer has a process for how you go from an idea in your head to putting it down on the screen or on paper. What's your process?

21:48 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1308s)

Like, well, usually I always start with an outline. Everything has to have an outline. You start putting ideas down in an outline, and the more you flood your ideas in there, the more you can organize. Microsoft Word helps you do that. You start promoting and demoting topics, shuffling them up and down, moving them left and right to see how things fit together. The more you do that, the better the final book is going to be, because it helps you build the whole picture. To me, everything always starts out scattered.

So I'm always like, oh, I've got to talk about this and this and this, and I move all over the map. Then, as I'm working on the idea, more ideas pop into my head, which again is why I have to have an outline. In fact, for WordPerfect For Dummies, the outline was so complete and so thorough that when I sat down to write it, I wrote it in three weeks. It took no time to write because it was all done in the outline. I had just thought about it so much and about how I wanted to present the information. The other thing is to leave the computer room.

All my life I've been a member of a gym, so I always go to the gym or go on a walk or do something to get out and free my mind so the ideas will come popping in again. Because as a writer, sometimes it's very frustrating when you're like, oh, I need to think of a good metaphor here. I need to think of something to compare this to so someone will understand it better. And I can't do that when I'm stale.

So even though I know I'm on a deadline and have to get work done, I'm going to leave the house, go walk around the park, do a couple of laps, go down to the river, whatever, throw rocks in the river, because I know that once I take my mind off it, the idea is going to rush into my head and I'll be like, yes, and then I have to go back. So that happens a lot, and that's really the source of inspiration. You have to leave. It's like the old writer guy sitting at his typewriter in a cabin in the woods with his coffee, trying to think of an idea.

Nothing's going to come to you that way. You have to go out and do something else. Take your mind off it. It's a left-brain, right-brain thing. So I do have a woodshop, and sometimes when I'm really frustrated I'll go out and try to make something out of wood. It's like, okay, I'm making another birdhouse or whatever. Then all of a sudden the idea comes in. It's like, yes, back to the computer. So that's how I do it.

24:13 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1453s)

Yeah, I think mind wandering is something that almost all the articles and research on what makes creative people creative bring up all the time. And it's also just important.

24:25 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1465s)

And some people don't have that. My mom wanted to be a writer. She doesn't have that. She's very focused, she's a very linear person. She thinks A, B, C, D, E. And I can be really scatterbrained at times. I can just hop around, which again is why I do an outline, because if my brain's hopping around and I'm just writing down a list of ideas, at some point I can switch gears and go, okay, now how do we organize this? What comes first? If I've got to talk about this, they already need to know this.

So this comes up here, and oh, they already need to know this before they know that. Again, that's how you build and present the information. I've read computer books where you're reading along and on page three it says, now just to find out how to do this, go to page 16. And I'm like, well, why do I need to go up there when it should be right here? It's not a choose-your-own-adventure book. In that sense, reference and linear, exactly. Yeah.

25:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1519s)

When you have an idea while doing something away from your computer and you want to jot it down, what do you use to do that?

25:27 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1527s)

Well, I use a lot of tools. Back in the old days I would get on my cell phone and leave myself a message. I had a separate cell phone and, of course, an office phone, and I would call the office phone and say, this is what you need to do, and leave myself a phone message. Now I can dictate into my phone or bring up an app, a writing app like Google Docs, and write something down. But most of the time it sticks in my head, and that's really cool.

The other day I was thinking of something I'm writing now that has to do with shapes, circles, squares, those kinds of things, and all of a sudden it popped into my head: getting into shape. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I can do puns. So I started thinking of all these shape puns and putting them in the book as much as I could and as much as made sense. So pretty much now the idea comes in and it's heavy enough that it sticks around with me. But when I'm thinking, oh yeah, I need to do that, I've got to write it down.

Sometimes you'll be walking around, come back into the office, and be like, yeah, what was that idea? I didn't write it down. Now I forgot. And of course with new technology and cloud storage it's really easy to keep all that stuff connected so I don't have to worry about. I used to have a Palm Pilot before phones got fancy, and I would write ideas down on that. But now I can write them down in Google Docs. It's saved in the cloud, it's here on the desktop, so that made it a lot easier.

But yeah, if I'm out wandering around and an idea pops into my head, I don't want to lose it. Yeah, and are you also someone who, if you have an.

27:09 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1629s)

Idea in the middle of the night, do you suddenly wake up and remember it in the morning, or do you jot it down right at that moment?

27:15 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1635s)

Just so you don't forget it. Usually when I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm screaming, and so those aren't really the ideas that I want to keep. Unfortunately, yeah, that hasn't happened in a while. It used to, though, and that's why I have a laptop by my bed, and the reason is so I can jot down the idea if I have an idea, and that has happened, and it's like you know, here I am at at 330 in the morning and the laptop lid is open and I'm writing down an idea. And that has happened a few times.

So, but again, it's like in a Google doc or somewhere, and it's just keeping it there. The other time is like, you know, I'll be out, I'll be in a boring meeting or it'll be a luncheon or something, and I'll just, I'll have an idea, and then I can flip up my phone and put it in there really fast, and that's one way to keep it, and it's, yeah, but most of the time, the good stuff. The good stuff I won't forget, it's more of the random stuff, it's more of the oh yeah, we should do that and that, and that.

It's like: now I have to write this down or I'll will forget that so.

28:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1690s)

So, end to end, how long does it take for you to go from starting your outline to getting a book ready to send to your publisher?

28:15 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1695s)

Depends on the deadline. There was one they gave me a week to do, and that was a terrible version of a book. It was just a week-long update, but they were pressuring me so hard to get that book out. But usually I give myself about two to three weeks to do a good outline, working on it at least an hour every day, building it out and getting it down almost to the paragraph level of what's going to be covered. If I can get that done, then the book may take me six weeks to write, and that's it. I can write them faster too.

It depends on how much of a social life I want and whether I want to go outside that day. But yeah, just getting that done. It's also one of the biggest problems for people who don't work for themselves and don't understand how that works: you really have to have a sense of duty to show up and actually get the work done. I know a lot of people who've tried to work for themselves and they're just too distracted. They'll go off and be like, oh, I should really clean this room right now. I've got a couple of minutes. Or they look outside and say, wow, it's really pretty.

I really want to go outside and play with the dog or whatever. You have to say, okay. This morning is a good example. I knew I had this event that we were going to be chatting here, and I said, okay, before I do that I want to go do these three things, and I think I have enough time. So I scheduled it so I could get that done and then get this done. After this, I have a bunch of other stuff I'd like to get done. I just set little deadlines, and I've been doing it so long that I can be successful at that.

But I know how long it takes to write things, and the current book I'm working on, which isn't due until January, I figured out in my head that if I can do maybe five or six pages every day, then I'll get that book done. So that's kind of my goal. If I can do more, it's even better. Then when I'm done with that, I'll go off and do something else. Generally I'm juggling several projects at a time, which also helps keep me fresh, because you don't want to get stuck and say, well, I really need a break now. And that happened once.

I was under a deadline and they wanted a book in like three weeks. I was like, oh, I'm going to have to work every day, 10 hours a day, to write this book. But after about four days of doing that I found out it doesn't work anymore. Your brain is all clogged up, and it's like I definitely need to take a day off. That's the refresher. That's getting out into nature. That's doing whatever, just leaving the scene. Then you come back all freshened up. So there is something to be said for taking a break every so often, and that's the way you do it.

30:58 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1858s)

Yeah, the example I often give when people ask this question of me is: do you remember the defragmenter from back in the day, like '95 and '98 and so on? There are moments where you're just seeing the pale teal color turn into a slightly darker one, slowly, one at a time, and going, man, this is never going to get done. Now, why was I watching that? I have no idea. But the thing is that at some point it starts going page after page and filling up gigantic blocks.

My view is always that what you want to optimize for is those giant blocks coming in, those large buckets, as opposed to focusing narrowly on this one word or something for eight hours, because you're going to make very little progress. But if you took a break and had other things to get your mind off what you're working on, you can optimize for those large things, which in aggregate is a much faster way of getting things done. Even though it may not look to you at that moment like you're spending your time productively.

31:52 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=1912s)

It's a marvelous analogy. And for anyone watching who isn't familiar with that, I would do that too, watching the defrag screen. You had a screen full of all these little dots and stuff and they were twinkling and moving just a little bit at a time, and it's like, I know it's working because it's doing something. But then at the end it's like big chunks shuffling up and down. Of course the result, after suffering through that, was that the computer was faster. Everything ran faster.

And I even fell for installing Norton SystemWorks back in the day and doing that little optimize thing where you probably deleted valid registry entries or removed things it needed from startup. But I'm like, oh, it's so much faster the first time around. After two restarts it goes bad again, let me run it one more time and make it work. But with defragmenting, there would be moments where you'd see an immovable region come up and I'm like, why is that region immovable? What's in there? It's all zeros and ones. What is it about those red, I think they were red, squares that can't move?

And is it safe for the other data to be right next to the immovable region? Like, what if it's radioactive or something and infects the other regions? If I have too many immovable regions, that's probably storage I can't use to install my games and do whatever I was doing. A lot of my core memories were probably about very mundane computer things and going, why does it do these things? Of course my interest was never to dive into the details. I'd just jump into something else instead. Yeah, those were the days. We didn't know anything. No, I forget. Well, I think Windows 98 had the defragmenter.

I think it was Windows Millennium that removed it. At that point you hit defragment and you just saw a progress bar. There was nothing to see anymore. Then I think after that, when XP came out, it was done automatically behind the scenes. You had the defragmenting UI to make people like us feel like we were doing something productive, but the reality was it was always happening behind the scenes without any active work. And the file system changed too, so it's much more efficient. Back in the old days that file system was designed for a 10-megabyte hard drive, so things got really sloppy fast. Now it's super efficient.

And of course with NVMe drives and SSDs and everything, it's all so fast you don't even notice it anymore. No more scare stories about going from FAT 16 to FAT 32 and what may or may not happen, and NTFS, just forget about that one. That would be like doing enterprise-level things at that moment.

34:37 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2077s)

Yeah, I do think a lot of people today don't really understand how easy it is now to just hit something and have it work. For me, I lived in a small town in Tennessee when I was doing a lot of my early computer stuff, and I remember my US Robotics modem. There were two competing standards, I believe, and at some point the government said it would standardize on V.90 as the option. Then there was a little firmware update we had to install from a floppy disk, and magically you now connected on the V.90 standard. I was in the back of my mind like, how in the world was that possible?

You had these two competing standards and people were basically in camp A or camp B. Your identity was wrapped up in that. The ISP you chose was wrapped up in it too, like, oh, I can't use that one. My modem won't work with that ISP. I need to use the other one. And then this thing came up where you just installed this update and suddenly all of it worked. Now you're like, wow, I'm connecting at 48.8 kbps. That's magical. It was crazy. Those were insane days. But now it all works. Nowadays my friends are like, yeah, I have a Starlink portable thing.

I'm just going to go hiking out in the middle of the woods, put it on the ground, and in 10 or 15 seconds there's a nice UI in the app and it works magically. I'm like, wow. Even my physical fiber connection here may not be as good at times as what is available there, and that's going to space and back. The technology has gotten pretty advanced, and that's why I always found your PCs For Dummies book so fascinating.

Later I'm like, wow, it changed a lot, because my memory of what it was back then and what your books are now, and how much they capture the changes, makes me think nobody who read a book from you 30 years ago would even recognize 90 percent of the material you're talking about right now, because it was so far ahead of its time and futuristic. When we describe the ability to just hit a button and have your internet work, and have video and audio conferencing in real time like what we're doing right now, that would have been unheard of back then. It's like, yeah, well.

36:36 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2196s)

Live video. I mean, that just was not a thing. Too slow. Images we find on the internet now and download were larger than a floppy disk, and that was 1.44 megabytes. And yet the other day I uploaded 36 megabytes' worth of stuff to the publisher, and I can imagine making 36 floppy disks and mailing them in. Whenever I see a file size in my inbox that's more than a few hundred kilobytes, my mind immediately goes back to, wait, I only had 15 megabytes of storage total in my entire email thing. I was paying for that extra storage. The free one would have been like one megabyte or so.

It was Lycos Mail or Hotmail or something like that. I'm always baffled by how quickly this changed. And I spent some time talking to high school and college students at my alma mater. Their mind starts off with where technology is right now, whereas whenever I think about something, I always go back 30 years and gradually get to today, and then I'm like, okay, now let's talk about what's going on right now. It's always fascinating seeing how people's default experiences are shaped by modern technology as opposed to what we had so many years ago, and by people who just use phones or tablets instead of computers.

And they think that when you design a website. They're going to say, hey, where's the mobile version? And it's like, mobile version? Yeah, exactly. We have this whole responsive design thing where we design for more than a 640-by-480 screen. Or DPIs being more than 72, that used to be the only one you cared about. You never cared about anything beyond that.

And then when I look back at my website stuff from the late 1990s, I'm like, yeah, this is garbage now, because for some reason the table in the top-left corner is taking up the whole page, because I never tested on anything else and no one was using anything beyond that one setup. So it's funny seeing how much the technology has evolved and how our behaviors have changed as well. Yeah, it's crazy.

38:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2321s)

Yeah, speaking of behaviors changing, writing has changed a lot from back then to now, especially how you write, how you market, and now with the internet, self-publishing, and video content and so on. How are you able to navigate all that? Because I know you're creating videos. You also have instructional content on LinkedIn, so you've definitely got your hand across both legacy publishing and more modern digital media.

39:06 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2346s)

Yeah, so LinkedIn Learning basically does all the marketing and everything, and I provide the content. I've also provided my own content online. The key is marketing, and I'm dumb when it comes to marketing. When it comes to the self-published books I have on Amazon Kindle, I subscribe to their marketing service and they market the books. So you type in what the topics are, what some competing titles are, some interests, some search words, and then when people are looking for that, your book comes up and hopefully they buy it. That's about all I do for marketing, because I'm really dumb when it comes to marketing.

Traditional publishers do the marketing, I write the book, and that's pretty much how I've been doing it. I'm just kind of ignorant when it comes to all that stuff.

39:52 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2392s)

Yeah, and I think that's something I've always noticed as a big change, especially nowadays, that the barrier to entry for someone to get a book published is fairly low. The traditional publisher process still has some hurdles, but if you're good at marketing you can bypass so many things. And I'm terrible at marketing too, because that's like a full-time job in its own way and it also requires you to shamelessly self-promote, which, if it's not in your personality to do that, just feels a little uncomfortable, or maybe even downright unappealing in some ways as well.

40:25 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2425s)

Yeah, no, I don't like tooting my own horn. That's another thing. Back in the 90s, when we had bookstores all over the place, I'd go visit a bookstore with my mom and she'd go, oh, there's your book, look, it's up there. My son wrote this book, and all this stuff. And I'm like, oh, Mom, why are you doing that? But yeah, I just don't. One time I went into a bookstore and found a bunch of my books, so I signed them and put them back on the shelf. I thought, well, this will be kind of cool. Whoever buys the book will get an autographed copy.

But that's about all I ever did.

40:55 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2455s)

I think the decline of bookstores in some ways makes it very difficult nowadays. If I go to the tech section of many bookstores now, it's tiny. The books that are there, and I've talked to my publisher about it, they say, yeah, you have to pay a lot of money even to be in those sections now, because it's not like you can just be there. I'm like, yeah, we're in canned-goods and cereal territory, where to be featured here you're competing with products that are, for the most part, substitutable goods, right?

41:22 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2482s)

Right, right. And it's always been that way. The thing is the turnover is so strong. Computer books are only good for so long. Some of them have legs. A programming book is going to be good as long as the language isn't overhauled too severely. But some of the other books, it's a high-turnover thing, and I think bookstores don't really want to take it. There used to be, like you said, when you went to Barnes & Noble it was awesome. There was a whole row of computer stuff and you could look at.

Whatever your topic was, there were dozens of books there that you could look at and see which one you liked the most. Now that's pretty much gone. It's sad too, because I still buy computer books as references, and the online thing isn't the same. You can look through some of the books, but you can't really see what it is you want to see. So I think books still have a place. I just wish the publishers would respect the books a bit more. When they do a Dummies book, it's just. It's like the paper quality is a little cheap, the cover is a little flimsy.

If they would put a little more into it, if someone's going to buy a book, I think they'd be willing to pay a little more to have something that's going to last. So that's just my thought.

42:33 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2553s)

No, agreed. And the grayscale and the black text is never quite the same. It looks a little fuzzy at times. And no, I completely agree with you on that, because I looked at some of the older books I got many years ago. They were three-color or full-color in some ways, and I'm like, okay, what was it about books back then that, ignoring inflation, the cost is very similar, yet now the same books, you're lucky if the publisher is willing to do a color copy version of it?

Like, we're going to do black and white primarily, and maybe three colors, just because you're being a pain and bugging us way too much on it. But yeah, I think we kind of lost the appeal of books because when you're given the option of reading a black-and-white book that's probably not the highest quality, or using the ebook version where it's all in color, it makes it difficult for a consumer to justify going, no, I'll get the book version anyway. Even though it's a more lousy experience.

And I do think that, like you mentioned, if publishers did a little bit more to make physical books appealing, it'd be a more equal conversation. It's like the convenience of portable ebook readers like an iPad or Kindle, but I also like this book here because I'm not sacrificing readability by choosing it. Oh man, we can talk forever about all of that. But also I think one change I've noticed is that back then, if you wanted to learn about some computer topic, you either had to go to a community college or some course and actually learn from a human being, or read books. Those were the big options.

There were VHS tapes, of course, on how to do stuff that you could buy as a series and so on. But nowadays you have a lot more competition. If I want to learn something brand new today, I don't go for a book immediately. I just go to YouTube and say, okay, what is the best thing I can find very quickly to give me a three-minute overview so I can see whether I want to go deeper into this? How has that changed how your books are marketed and written, knowing that there's another market here for this?

44:23 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2663s)

Well, I'm still writing to the person who's a linear learner and needs a book. I do have videos for doing stuff on the internet, but again I don't market that. I'm still looking for the traditional person who needs a book as a reference, wants to keep it handy, needs to have that thing. In my opinion, and I've done this before, it's quicker for me to look something up in a book than to try to find that one perfect video. As anyone knows who's looked it up. My latest example was lawn sprinklers.

One of my sprinkler heads was acting weird, and I wanted to find a video on how to fix it. I think I looked at 20 of them, because you start one and all of a sudden it's, hey guys, good to see you again, subscribe and like my channel, and you're like, just tell me what I need to know. It takes so long to get that. Then you have to find the one person you can understand, who isn't holding the camera with one hand and trying to do it with the other, and it's just horrible. That's why I always say no.

I'm going to default to going to a book, because not only can I open the book, like the one I just bought the other day on writing a C compiler, not only can I open it and leaf through it, I can mark it up, draw in it, and put a sticky note in there that says things. And then that's a reference I can use in the future. Something like my UNIX Power Tools book has all these marks in it, and pages where there's something on the page that says this is important, with notes written in the margins. That's something I do, especially when it happens to be about finding files.

These are reasons why I have books. I think there are other people like us who need that reference, who know it's quicker for me to grab that book off the shelf and look up something I've seen before because I know it's in there, than it would be to start searching through videos and think, oh wow, I have to watch even three minutes of this just to find that one thing I've already written in the margin. So that's my philosophy.

46:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2801s)

No, very true. I was reading a statistic a while ago that said sales of bookshelves have been declining year over year for decades. On the back of that I'm like, okay, I like to write because I enjoy writing, and my style is that I put my content on my website for free first and then put it into book form. It's like free marketing. Then I'm like, but why would anyone ever buy a book if bookshelves keep disappearing and people aren't using books anymore? To me these proxy metrics concern me. I have a six-year-old daughter, for example, and she likes reading books.

But for technical things she's more comfortable with a touchscreen than a mouse and keyboard. That makes sense, because I didn't have a touchscreen until much later in my life. Now the default is touchscreen. My Apple MacBook Pro does not have a touchscreen, and her default reaction is, let me touch the screen. And I'm like, actually, it's not a touch screen, you can't really touch it. In the back of my mind I'm like, why is it not a touchscreen? Is Apple not seeing the same data that we are, that the world is moving in this direction?

Sometimes I wonder if you and I are among the last people in the world who still think about books and writing that way.

47:52 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2872s)

Yeah, it's still that way. What I always tell people when I do an interview or reference it is: when the power goes out, you can still read a book. When the internet is down, I can still work because my references are all here. That's why it's important. And granted, that would be me too, because like you and everyone else there are programs I use, like Adobe After Effects, and I don't know everything in that program. I don't even think if there were a book, it would probably be this thick, and all I want is to look up one thing, like how do I animate this?

There are some great videos out there from people who can show you exactly how to do it in two minutes. But all that's gone when the power's out or the internet is down or whatever. So there's still value in having a book, and there's also value in that way of learning. I've seen studies saying that when you learn something by reading a book, you retain it longer than when you learn it by watching a video. So I think there's magic there too.

48:59 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2939s)

Yeah, and I think also if what you're doing is annotating and taking notes as part of how you're learning, you retain the knowledge a whole lot more. And the ultimate version is if you can teach it back to somebody else. That's like the peak of understanding the material really, really well. In some ways that's a motivation for me to learn random things. If I write about it and teach people, that means I fully understood it. And often while I'm writing it, I detect gaps in my knowledge or I'm like, wait, why is it done this way?

Let me go back and explain this, because someone reading it is going to be like, why is he explaining something that doesn't make any sense? So it's been a good motivating factor sometimes in just becoming better at something. It's having that insight.

49:35 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=2975s)

And that insight is also how I write. I like to do a little parable on something. It's like, you're trying to do this and this, and now we're going to apply that same thing to what's going on in the computer and, hopefully, instill that insight into someone so they get just a hint of what's really going on, as opposed to saying, do this random thing, this random thing, and this random thing, and then it creates whatever it is you want to create. Well, they'll never understand it.

All they know is that there are these steps they have to follow, and then they won't be able to handle it when things don't work. But if you can tell them what's really going on behind the scenes. So here you're setting this up, you're putting these things together to build this machine that's going to do this for you and then finally produce the result. Then they can understand it, and that's when they become a better user, as opposed to someone who, like in the early days when I wrote DOS For Dummies, would literally have flower-petal sticky notes around their monitor with the instructions for everything they needed to do.

It's like, okay, so I need to send this over to accounting. So there it is. I need to type that, then that, then that, and of course if it didn't work, they're stuck. They have the instructions there, and they're like, I typed exactly what it said and it's not working. That was the person I was writing DOS For Dummies for. It's like, look, here it is, and now it's going to be in a book so you can free all your sticky notes from the monitor.

50:55 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3055s)

You know, speaking of After Effects, a lot of your videos have animations in them. Did you create the animations yourself, and did you create them in After Effects?

51:03 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3063s)

I did, yeah, in After Effects most of the time. Originally it was Flash, Adobe Flash, and that was a silly program. Some of the early videos used Flash, but I would just capture it, so it wasn't Flash animation exactly, it was recorded. Then After Effects could do all kinds of miraculous things, which is fun. That's why I do some of the animations, and I'm pretty sure the way I'm using it is awkward and wrong and that there's probably a better way to do it. For someone who has that insight and says, oh, why are you doing that?

You should do this, and here's the way you keyframe it, and all these other technical terms. I'd be like, okay. Some of it takes a long time to do, but it was fun, and I like stuff like that. It keeps me interested.

51:53 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3113s)

Same. And for me, when I started using Adobe Premiere, I realized I reached that point where back in the day, when I had more time and more patience, I would actually want to go deep into something, fully learn everything inside and out, and then go from there. But now when I get to new technologies, I'm like, I don't care why it does the thing or how it works. I just want the bare minimum needed to get this particular job done, which in my case is auto captions. Give me auto captions.

I don't know why I'm clicking this button, and I don't know what breaks if I click the wrong one or look at it the wrong way, so I'm just going to blindly copy what I've learned and do the things I remember. Back then I was like, I'm never going to be that person. I'm never going to be the person who looks at a manual, does the thing blindly, and memorizes the steps without deeply understanding what's going on behind the scenes. Lo and behold, now I am that person for a certain class of apps where I don't really care how this works. I don't care about color profiles and things.

There's an auto button. I'm going to hit the auto button, change some fonts here and there, and that's it. I'm not going to do anything more. If I keep touching it, I might break something. I've reached that point, and I wonder if you ever get that way. You seem to be far more interested in a variety of topics. We've talked about you learning C programming and talking a lot about the C language and so on. So I feel like you're still in the area where new technology excites you and you still want to go deep into these things.

53:25 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3205s)

I try as much as I can. I used Premiere 2, too, and some of the text stuff in there would frustrate me until it finally dawned on me and I gained the insight into what was going on. I was like, how does this work? Why is it being stubborn? Why doesn't it do it the way I want it to do it? I had to get into the frame of mind of whoever the programmer was, or whatever their audience was, and say, okay, I get it now.

And once that clicked, and if you use a lot of Adobe stuff there's kind of a similar thread between all their pro programs, once you figure out how things work you can guess a little bit, and that's just from using the program for so long. But I still know there's a lot more stuff going on in these programs than what I am doing. You search up how to do something in After Effects or Premiere and then YouTube starts feeding you more and more videos along those lines. Some of them I'll look at and be like, wow, you can do that?

And not only that, the video is only two minutes long, so it's something really simple to do. That's really cool. I think back in the old days, back in the 1990s, it was possible for you and I to know everything and figure it all out. Today it's just impossible. So you do as best you can, and of course if you really want to learn it, you get a book and hopefully the book will help you get through that. But yeah, it's tough.

I would never say I know everything about everything, because there's always someone who's going to come up and say, hey, here's a trick, and I'll be like, wow, I'm embarrassed I didn't know that. Yeah.

55:03 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3303s)

And the fear I often have is: am I spending a lot of time learning the right tool for the right job? I have an Adobe subscription, so I have Premiere, After Effects, all these tools that come along with it, whereas some of my more graphically and video-oriented friends use Final Cut Pro. And I'm like, wait, am I missing out here? Am I learning the wrong thing? Then you look at what a lot of content creators use today. There are all these other tools being created. You have Camtasia, you have CapCut, you have like 20 different things, and you watch the videos and think, wow, this is much easier to use.

Should I be learning that instead? This is the paralysis of choice in some ways. Back then there really weren't too many things out there. You had Macromedia and Adobe. They had very different styles of presenting UI. I was very much a team Macromedia person when I was using Flash, and once Adobe bought them, I found that things changed. The tooltips were different, things were different, but luckily I wasn't doing too much of that kind of work at the time anyway, so I was like, it's fine. Today you have small one-person developer shops that can use more modern technologies and not have to work at a low level.

There are APIs for so many things, as opposed to having to reinvent what it's like to capture video from your hardware using very basic primitives. Now it's like, there's an API in whatever language you're using. You write a couple of lines of code and now you have video in your app. You're like, wow, this makes it so much easier, which also means that there are many more options to choose from on how to do this.

56:33 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3393s)

Yeah, I think that part's fun to me. I enjoy that part. That's hacking.

56:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3401s)

Switching over to C programming, a lot of your books, and really your whole career, show that you've been programming for a long time. I think you mentioned you started programming before you even got your word-processing system fully set up and so on. But a lot of your early books were less about programming and more about general topics. Was it something where you always liked to program for fun, but chose to write about the things people at that time were most interested in?

57:05 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3425s)

Yeah, and you know, you're going to write about what's going to sell. My start at the computer book publishing house was writing programming, BASIC programming, and I knew BASIC pretty well because that was all I could do on my computer for a while. So I bought a lot of books on BASIC and wrote a lot of programs and figured out how to do a lot of things. Now, BASIC is slow. Once I figured out it was slow, I was like, well, what's faster than this?

And then I took up Assembly Language, did the same thing, bought books on learning Assembly Language and programmed a lot of stuff in assembly, and then picked up C after that, because assembly is very slow as far as development is concerned. The programs are really fast, very tiny, very fast, but C is kind of a midway point in between. So I picked up C and learned that. Of course I'm still learning it because there's just a lot to know and a lot of good stuff out there. It's always been a process, and I enjoy it. Programming is very relaxing to me.

It's fun to think of a problem or find a problem online. Way back when I was a kid, my mom had the Time-Life series on computers, and one of the problems they presented was the knight's tour. You take a knight on a chessboard and the knight can move to every square on the board without hitting the same square twice. That's a computer problem. You can figure that out. After years of admiring that, when I was just a kid, I finally coded it. I said, maybe I should think about coding the knight's tour, and I did it for fun.

I put it up on my C For Dummies blog and showed a little animation of the knight moving around the chessboard, hitting every square and never landing on the same square twice. To me that was incredibly satisfying, because I did it on my own. I'm like, well, how would I do this? Okay, we need recursion or something. We'll just figure it out, and then figure out how to do it for different-size chessboards, because there's a minimum size, but you could have a chessboard with 200 squares and the knight can still go all the way around and never hit the same square twice, because that's the algorithm.

For me it was really fun, and that's why I do it, because I enjoy it. So I'm nuts, but I pass along that knowledge to other people. I like telling people how it works and explaining it in a way that's easy to understand, because back in the day programming people were really reluctant to help beginners out. It was kind of a protect-your-turf type thing. And I'm not like that. I'm like, no, I'll show you how to do it, and here's the insight and here's what you're supposed to do to make this happen. That's always been fun for me.

59:49 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3589s)

Yeah, so what motivates you to keep writing?

59:51 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3591s)

Money. Well, I enjoy doing it. I'm doing more online stuff, which I really enjoy. YouTube videos and things like that are more exciting to me than writing, which, like I said earlier, is basically an 18th-century technology. It's old and stagey. I still enjoy doing it, but today things are more lively, more interactive, more on the internet. There's a lot of good stuff that's going to come out. As far as learning and interaction are concerned, I think you're going to see a lot with online learning pretty soon. The writing is still fun. I'm still writing books. People always say, oh, so you're still writing books.

And I'm like, yeah, are you still reading them? Right now I have a book contract. I just finished two books, so I'm working on a third. These are mostly updates. Actually one was a new book, and then I want to update some other books because they go out of style. That version of PCs For Dummies I showed earlier is seven years old, so obviously we need a new version out there if people want to keep buying that book.

It's always fun, and I also do some self-publishing, which is nice because it lets me do shorter books, maybe 100 pages long, as opposed to publishers who want something that's three to 400 pages long so it fits on the shelf and pushes the competition away. So I can do some short little publishing things that I have on Amazon Kindle, and I want to do more of those too. I've just been really busy.

1:01:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3679s)

Have you thought about doing paperback editions of your self-publishing books as well?

1:01:25 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3685s)

Yeah, they are. I had them all printed out. With Kindle I assume it's only going to be ebooks, but I did Dan Gookin's Guide to cURL Programming, Guide to ncurses Programming, and Guide to XML and JSON Programming. These are all C programming things, and they were all things I was interested in. Then I'm like, sorry, I'm off camera, so I thought, you know what, I'll just write this up and put it in a book. I want to do one on pointers for C, one on network programming, and just do these little quick things for people who want to stick to one topic.

I tried to sell that to the publisher and they weren't interested. I said we need to do one-topic books, books that are really thin and just cover one topic. You don't bother padding it out to 600 pages. Let's just get to the point, because that's what most programmers want to do. They don't want to sit down and read the history of things, which, as much as I love those other books I have, a lot of them sit there and say, back in 1962, and it's like, okay, I can read that later when I really want to understand it, but right now I want to get my hands dirty. So.

1:02:29 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3749s)

No, it's funny, because exactly the reason I got into self-publishing as well is that I wanted to talk about one particular topic very narrowly and then get it done. I also had the other, more insidious goal, which is that a lot of children's book series used to paint a picture across the spines when you put them on the shelf together. And I was like, that's what I want to do. I want to have a series of really small books so that when you put them on the shelf next to each other they paint a picture.

And if you're a completionist, you're going to be like, I don't care about the other 80 books he wrote, but I can't have this picture be incomplete. I want to buy the other 80 just to satisfy that desire. The publisher didn't find that interesting at all, and I think they knew exactly what I was referring to. So I'm like, okay, maybe I don't know everything they know about it, but they definitely understood what it meant back in the 80s, the 0, 90s and so on. And you need a bookshelf for that too. So a bookshelf, exactly.

My first book will be how to get a bookshelf, build it, or buy one. What am I going to do? And the second will be what do you do with a bookshelf, because clearly people have no idea anymore what to do with one. But I have tons of bookshelves. Matter of fact, I'm the guy who has books piled up on the table because there's not enough room on the bookshelf. So, oh man. But Dan, I feel like you and I could talk about this forever.

It was great chatting with you, and I can't wait to see more of your books as they come out, and to continue seeing how much other people enjoy your content over the years to come as well.

1:04:05 - Dan Gookin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GG1Vm7bc8&t=3845s)

Thank you very much, and I wish you the best of success. You're fun, and I think that's great, and thank you for using this platform to help spread the good word. Anytime.


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