Books

Glenn Reid, principal and founder of RightBrain Software, has written and published two books with Addison-Wesley, both on the PostScript Language.

PostScript Language Program Design, 1987

The first of these books, PostScript Language Program Design, is Adobe's "green book", and is still in print after 16 years (and in fact has not even been revised in that time!). It's available at technical book stores everywhere. It's a pretty hard-core book for those with serious PostScript programming to do.

Thinking in PostScript, 1990

The second book, Thinking in PostScript, did not have the power of Adobe's marketing behind it, and has been out of print since the first printing -- but is a valuable book nonetheless. It takes a completely different angle from all other PostScript books. The book is a result of Glenn Reid's years trying to teach people to write PostScript programs, during which he discovered that people tended to try to make PostScript "look like" other programming languages they already knew. There is even a chapter in this book entitled "PostScript Is Not Like C", because it is really a very different language, and one must learn to "think" in PostScript in order to be a good programmer.

We're proud to offer the full text of the Thinking in PostScript book on-line as an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file. At some point we make it available as HTML as well, but need to upgrade FrameMaker first.

NOTE: The book is being made freely available from my web site, but only for personal use. You are NOT free to redistribute it in any way without my permission, post it on your web site, sell it to anyone else, or otherwise infringe my copyright.

The PDF file is 846k and includes a set of Bookmarks for easy navigation. Click here or on the book cover to download the pdf file: