At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
    -- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985

Well, this issue is coming out a little later in winter than I'd hoped, but it's been a busy few months here at Logical Expressions. Inc.

The biggest and most exciting news is that we have released our first ebook. Web Business Success: The Logical Guide to Doing Business on the Web is by Logical Expressions' veep and resident nerd, James Byrd.

Sure, I'm biased, but I've worked with a lot of techie types in my time and James is an unusual guy. He can make even really nerdy stuff make sense. (You may have noticed as I have that unlike James, most nerds don't speak English; they speak nerd and that's it.)

Long-time readers have undoubtedly read a lot of James' writing. As an editor, I enjoy the fact that his writing is easy to read and understand, even when he's talking about complex subjects.

For example, in this issue, even non-programmers can get useful information from James' Programming Principles column. In this installment, he talks about the realities of "herding cats" i.e. managing different people and changing requirements to get a development project done. In many cases, it's just not pretty. But James offers a number of recommendations and techniques to help developers get software projects out the door on time.

Speaking of software, we've also been promoting our Logical Web Publisher software that we use for all our content sites (including this one). Every person who has spent quality time using the software basically loves it.

I don't know…maybe you have to have experienced the pain of coding HTML by hand or dealt with other slow, convoluted, and buggy site building systems to truly understand what a wonderful tool the Logical Web Publisher is. When you know what you are missing, the LWP is a welcome relief ;-)

Susan Daffron
Editor