About the Author

Dr. Donald A. Miller is a 25 year alumnus of IBM R&D in semiconductor VLSI, a holder of several U.S. patents and two IBM patent awards. His degrees are in physics and electrical engineering.

Donald's introduction to computer programming was an undergraduate course in numerical analysis using FORTRAN, for which he got just a 'C' grade. It was not until his own graduate studies required data analysis that he really started to learn the subject. Consequently, he believes that real life examples are the best teachers of programming, including taking apart someone else's code.

Donald has worked in several dialects, each, of FORTRAN, APL, and BASIC, on IBM compatible computers ranging from lap-top to mainframe. Prototype data systems that he demonstrated on the PC were ported to main frame systems, one of which earned him an IBM award.

In the early days of the IBM Personal Computer, Donald found it easier to make most of his own software, rather than try to keep up with the emerging commercial offerings. IBM co-workers helped with their own nifty programs they made available on the internal network, such as powerful editors that could be used for programming or simple word processing. Now Donald programs only occasionally.

"Power Basic for Business and Technology" was born from Donald's recent work notes on learning PB, then fleshed out with various prototype applications. Attempts to learn C# (or C/C++) had been abandoned after about six weeks, but Donald was contributing to the PB users' fora in less than four weeks.

Comments from various sources, not limited to the forums at powerbasic.com, described PowerBASIC^tm to be easier to learn than many "professional" languages, but fully capable of handling any application that could be written in C/C++, DELPHI, FORTRAN, PASCAL, Visual BASIC, and others, and usually with smaller executable programs and faster performance on the same operating system. Donald believes this.