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Rod Stephens started out as a mathematician, but while studying at MIT, he discovered the joys of programming and has been programming professionally ever since. During his career, he has worked on an eclectic assortment of applications in such fields as telephone switching, billing, repair dispatching, tax processing, wastewater treatment, and training for professional football players. Rod has written 14 books that have been translated into half a dozen different languages, and more than 200 magazine articles covering Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, Delphi, and Java. He is currently a columnist for Visual Basic Developer. Rod’s popular VB Helper Web site receives several million hits per month and contains thousands of pages of tips, tricks, and example code for Visual Basic programmers.
Wrox Author: Rod Stephens
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 US $39.99 Add to Cart
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 US $39.99 Add to Cart
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 US $39.99 Add to Cart
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 US $39.99 Add to Cart
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Q&A with Rod Stephens
What is your job title? Where do you work?
President of Rocky Mountain Computer Consulting, Inc. It's my one-person consulting company.
WIn what industry do you work?
I write custom business software in all sorts of industries. I have worked on projects in telephony, state government tax collection, water reclamation, billing, ticket sales, cartography, CAD, and even professional football.
Dream job if you didn't work with computers?
Without question I would want to be an author. I have already written 16 books and more than 200 magazine articles, mostly about Visual Basic programming. Like many technical authors, however, I would also like to write fiction. Perhaps some day I'll make the time!
Where do you currently live?
Boulder Colorado, a great place for all sorts of outdoor activities: biking, hiking, riding, skiing, and so on.
First job after you finished school?
I went straight from graduate school at MIT to GTE Laboratories. There I helped build several business automation systems to perform such tasks as automatic repair dispatch, telephone switch management, and billing.
Best tech innovation?
I've worked on several projects that changed the way certain companies did business. The repair dispatch system we built at GTE Laboratories saved the company between $50 and $350 million per year and is still in use despite the fact that the company has been sold repeatedly since then. The Interactive Playbook I worked on for professional football teams expanded the capabilities of computer-based coaching tools. Now pretty much every professional team uses a similar tool. One of my favorite accomplishments is my book Visual Basic Graphics Programming. It brought together for the first time a huge number of advanced graphical techniques for Visual Basic developers. It covers such topics as two- and three-dimensional graphics, fractals, and ray tracing. Some readers have gone on to produce some truly remarkable results (you can see some examples at www.vb-helper.com/vbgp_readers.html).
Childhood ambition?
At one point I wanted to be a park ranger, but in college I discovered how much fun mathematics and programming can be and never looked back.
