I grew up with the Whole Earth Catalog, and it was a fantastic repository of knowledge but wierdly, quite hard to use to find the "tools for everyman" it claimed to be: the one thing it wasn't was well organized. What sticks in the mind was the tone, and one really weird article about using a swiss army knife to kill warts. (it works, sometimes: if you irritate a wart enough you can switch on the body's defensive network. Thats why the aspirin cream method works)
Victor Papanek "Design for the real world" is in many ways, better. Less entertaining, less anarchic, but I used some of the ideas to get furniture made over 25 years ago I still use (the plywood single-cut slotted shelves which stack)
Or Eric Sloane's "Reverence for wood" which is lyrical but surprisingly direct about tools and how they work.
We had a tools book and the american barn. The tools book was just fantastic for a young kid. The American barn, the paper was infused with apple wood and cedar scent. Transfixing.
No mention of Visual Basic/Delphi which represented the height of programming productivity for domain experts in the 1990s. You could build what your interface would look like, and "hook it up" with a few lines of Basic or Pascal in the event handlers.
We've lost so much ground because of the .NET insanity on the part of Microsoft, and the greed of Borland.
I grew up with the Whole Earth Catalog, and it was a fantastic repository of knowledge but wierdly, quite hard to use to find the "tools for everyman" it claimed to be: the one thing it wasn't was well organized. What sticks in the mind was the tone, and one really weird article about using a swiss army knife to kill warts. (it works, sometimes: if you irritate a wart enough you can switch on the body's defensive network. Thats why the aspirin cream method works)
Victor Papanek "Design for the real world" is in many ways, better. Less entertaining, less anarchic, but I used some of the ideas to get furniture made over 25 years ago I still use (the plywood single-cut slotted shelves which stack)
Or Eric Sloane's "Reverence for wood" which is lyrical but surprisingly direct about tools and how they work.