Ramondo’s review of The Minimum You Need to Know to be an OpenVMS Application Developer > Likes and Comments

Thank you for taking time to review this book. HP owns OpenVMS in name only. They have subbed the porting to x86, licensing, development and support to VSI.

http://www.vmssoftware.com/

FMS still rules the land, even today in 2019. You can visit here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!top...

and look for the June 3, 2019 post from Robert A. Brooks who is somehow involved with the VSI port to x86.

"We have sold many DECforms and FMS licenses."

Why does FMS still rule the land? Calling what Linux terminals have VT100 support is nothing short of criminal. They constantly require one to hack configuration, if not the actual source code itself, to get something close to VT terminal capabilities even when the terminal is set to VT100 mode.

Here are a pair of threads for you.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!sea...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!sea...

As to your take on Ruminations, I wouldn't write a tech book without such a chapter nor would I bother to read one which didn't have something like it. Knowledge without wisdom is worthless.

It's entertaining really. Those who are wrongly educated will decry chapters like that have no place in a technical book. Those who are correctly educated and see the wisdom of said writing will praise the wisdom of the author offering fountains of thanks for having shared it with the public.

You really need to check out "Secrets of Consulting" https://personalmba.com/review/secret...

"Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions" https://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/wick...

and of course "Peopleware" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...

All books for the technical audience and all opinion.

If "Ruminations" stuck in your craw then you are really going to love my upcoming book "The Phallus of AGILE and Other Ruminations." Hopefully before end of 2019. It's out for second round of editing now.

Speaking of editing, This title went through 3 rounds of external editing using 3 different editors. I believe the final one came from what is now called "ServiceScape".
https://www.servicescape.com/

For geek books I get 3 rounds of editing. For novels I do 5 and I don't hire on the cheap. The problem with editing a technical book is that most grammar Nazi type editors tend to happy flip past the first page or two of text following source code because their eyes have glazed over.

On reflection the tone of the original review seemed harsh - I've dialled it back a little. Plus I used the book to brush up on my VMS and RDB knowledge before a very technical job interview, and got the job - so it's 4 stars now.

Ramondo wrote: "On reflection the tone of the original review seemed harsh - I've dialled it back a little. Plus I used the book to brush up on my VMS and RDB knowledge before a very technical job interview, and g..."

And now you understand the complete purpose of the book. It contains the minimum you need to know to get a job. Visual-whatever programmers can't survive in an OpenVMS (or any green screen) shop.

Thanks for fessing up to getting the job!

Search the Internet job openings for the Arconic VAX/VMS posting being shopped around by Indian firms. They will never fill it for the $50/hr they are looking to pay. It does, however, have everything from the book, except MySQL (which really has failed spectacularly since Oracle bought InnoDB), as a skill for the job requirement.

Thanks again for updating your review. Far too many people empty their colon and run.

I do hope the job you just took wasn't the Navistar RDB gig. That's an unfixable situation. I used to work there. Once they went off-shore all of the systems got shredded. Nobody has done any maintenance on those databases since 2021.