UniForum and Prentice Hall to Launch UniForum Press

Titles Planned on Range of Open Technologies

UniForum and major trade publisher Prentice Hall PTR are cooperating on a new book publishing alliance to be called UniForum Press. As many as 12 new titles are planned for 1996. The new venture for UniForum will produce books with considerably more substance than the technical overviews and white papers it has traditionally published for its membership. The older series of technical overviews will continue, while UniForum Press titles will be offered to UniForum members at significant discounts.

The arrangement with Prentice Hall calls for the creation of three series of books, which will allow authors to explore open technology topics at different levels. The first, a series of pocket guides of approximately 150 pages each, will cover the basics that interested readers want to know about a host of topics such as the World-Wide Web, data warehousing, or messaging groupware.

The second series, to be called Principles to Practice, will address ideas in greater depth, to provide users of computing systems with the information on specific topics that they must know to do their jobs effectively. These guides may cover topics introduced by the pocket guide series or new areas of interest, such as software quality control or system security.

The third series will be state-of-the-art, comprehensive references that deliver detailed, systematic treatments on issues that may include software architectures or object reuse.

A UniForum Press call for proposals that invites submissions for consideration will be published in UniNews and UniForum Monthly. It also will be placed on the UniForum Web home page. UniForum members are urged to participate.

Anthony I. "Tony" Wasserman, founder and chairman of Interactive Development Environments (IDE) of San Francisco, has been appointed the first UniForum Press editor-in-chief. Tony is a member of UniForum's Technical Steering Committee, which will play an important role in the formulation of UniForum Press policies and its review process. Tony brings to this new task an impressive background of academic, publishing, and business achievement. Prior to starting IDE, he was on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley and has consulted for such industry-leading companies as IBM, DEC, and TRW. Tony is a fellow of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE. His undergraduate work was in math and physics at UC Berkeley, and his Ph.D. is in computer science from the University of Wisconsin. He also is the subject of this issue's "Personality Profile".

When asked for his personal mission statement for UniForum Press, Wasserman replied, "I have been around university and mainstream scientific publishing for some time now, and I believe with UniForum Press we have the opportunity to create a set of publications that bridge the gap between basic theory and the mechanics of using specific products, focusing on books that help practicing computer professionals and their managers understand key concepts and technologies."

UniForum's partner in this venture is Prentice Hall's Professional Technical and Reference unit (PTR), one of the world's leading publishers of technical literature. Prentice Hall PTR, a division of Simon & Schuster, will market UniForum Press books to audiences worldwide through its retail, catalog, book club, university, and subsidiary rights outlets. It is a leader in the exploration of the Internet for the sale and distribution of technical materials, a policy that fits with UniForum's stated goal of increasing its role in electronic commerce. Information on how members can order UniForum Press titles at discount will soon be available over the UniForum home page: URL http://www.uniforum.org.