Greetings. Welcome to Rusty's Home Page.

I grew up in New Orleans to which I periodically return in search of a decent bowl of gumbo. However, I currently reside in the University Heights neighborhood of Irvine with my wife Beth and my cats Charm (named after the quark) and Marjorie (named after my mother-in-law).

In what passes for real life these days, I'm a software engineer and writer, mostly of computer books (though I'm trying to branch out). I've also been known to speak at a conerence or two including Software Development Expo, Summit 2000, MacFair, OOP, XMLDevCon, JavaDevCon, XMLOne, XMLEurope, Extreme Markup Languages, JAOO, Javapolis, JavaZone, STARWest, STPCon, EclipseWorld, XML 2006, and MacWorld. I've also spoken and trained the developers at numerous corporations including Bank of America, Verizon, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and Hoffman-LaRoche. I'm represented by David Rogelberg, of the Studio B Literary Agency. Here are some of my books:

My family keeps bugging me to "write a book they can understand" so I hope one day to branch out of the computer book ghetto and write some more general non-fiction. It hasn't happened yet though. In the meantime, though, I've begun keeping a blog and online journal about whatever topics strike my eye, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Buffy in Cyberspace, Intelligence, Timothy Leary, The Spot, Fruitopia, Fuzzy Truth, Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, The vagaries of book titles, Cab Rides in New York, and Robert Anton Wilson's The New Inquisition

The quickest, most reliable means of reaching me is to send email to elharo@macfaq.com. I don't give out my phone number or street address to any and all on the net; but if for some reason you'd like to call me or send snail mail, send me email with your phone number, and I'll get back to you. (It wouldn't hurt if you told me why you wanted to call me either.)

I'm a member of several professional organizations including the National Writers' Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the World Wide Web Artists Consortium, and of course the DNRC, Dogbert's New Ruling Class.

As well as my popular books and writings on the web, I've written and cowritten a number of technical papers on topics ranging from solar physics to railguns to baseball. Most recently:

• Harold, E., "Obscuring XML", Extreme Markup Languages 2005
• Harold, E., "XOM Design Principles", Extreme Markup Languages 2004
• Harold, E., "SAX Conformance Testing," XML Europe 2004
• Bukiet, B., Harold, E., and Palacios, J., "A Markov Chain Approach to Baseball," Operations Research, Volume 45, Number 1, January-February 1997, pp. 14-23
• T.R. Rimmele, P.R. Goode, E. Harold, R.T. Stebbins, "Dark Lanes in Granulation and the Excitation of Solar Oscillations," Astrophysical Journal, 444, L119-L122 (1995).
• Harold, E., Bukiet, B., and Peter, W., "Maximum Projectile Velocity in an Augmented Railgun,"; IEEE Transaction on Magnetics, Volume 30, Number 4, July 1994, pp. 1433-1436

I've also been known to cross over to the other side of the fence and do some editing on occasion. I've been technical editor for Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days by David Till, The Developer's Guide to the Java Web Server by Dan Woods, Larne Pewkowsky, and Tom Snee, and for the Java chapter of Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networks, 3rd Edition, and the XML chapter of Cay Horstmann's Big Java, 2nd Edition.

Over the years, I've written a few a number of shorter form articles:

• The Open Road: Building the JDK
• Java 2007: The year in preview
• Introducing Subversion
• New elements in HTML 5
• Ten Predictions for XML in 2007
• Testing Legacy Code
• Managing XML data: Identify XML documents
• XML 2007
• Simple Xalan extension functions
• Tip: Debug stylesheets with xsl:message
• Managing XML data: eXist -- an open source native XML database
• Pull parsing XML in PHP
• Tip: Combine and alternate xml-stylesheet processing instructions
• Encode your XML documents in UTF-8
• Managing the Java classpath (UNIX and Mac OS X)
• JavaOne 2007: Prodigal Sun returns to the client
• Managing the Java classpath (Windows)
• Managing XML data: Native XML databases
• Why XForms?
• XForms extensions to XPath
• The Java XPath API
• Tip: Configure SAX parsers for secure processing
• The Java XML Validation API
• Measure test coverage with Cobertura
• SimpleXML processing with PHP
• Fuzz testing
• RELAX NG with custom datatype libraries
• Testing object serialization
• Tip: Configure Apache to send the right MIME type for XHTML
• Managing XML data: XML catalogs
• XML in 2006
• Tip: Loop with recursion in XSLT
• An early look at JUnit 4
• Testing Legacy Code
• Zap bugs with PMD
• Measure test coverage with Cobertura
• Managing XML data: A look ahead
• Managing XML data: Identify XML documents
• Managing XML data: XML catalogs
• Native XML databases: Theory and Reality
• Test Your Tests With Jester
• An early look at sXBL
• RELAX NG with custom datatype libraries
• 10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0
• RDDL Me This: What Does a Namespace URL Locate?
• The XMLPULL API
• An Introduction to StAX
• Using XInclude
• Who Trusts the Trustees? Trusted Security Providers in the Java Cryptography Extension 1.2.1
• The Java Gated Community Process

I've also been interviewed here and there:

• ONJava.com: A Distributed Discussion with Elliotte Rusty Harold
• O'Reilly: An Interview with Elliotte Rusty Harold
• Artima: What's Wrong with XML APIs
• TechNetCast Play: Interview with Elliotte Rusty Harold (Video)