Addison-Wesley Professional is a book publisher that produces textbooks, pamphlets, online reference guides and educational sourcebooks. They are one of the leading companies for publishing technical literature for engineers, computer programming and administrations. Addison-Wesley Professional’s writers tend to be leading experts in programming and developing, or else teachers, designers and proteges. While their main focus is on the art of computing, the materials they release cover a wide array of educational subjects and technologies.
Founded in 1942 in Boston Massachussetts, Addison-Wesley Professional was the product of Melbourne Wesley Cummings and Lew Addison Cummings. From the beginning, it focused on new and emerging technologies that could be understood by the public. The first book printed through Addison-Wesley Professional was Mechanics by Francis Weston Shears. They kept up with the technology as it expanded, publishing their first book on computers in 1951 with The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer by Wilkes, Wheeler and Gills. They were bought in 1988 by Pearson PLC, and in 1998 a subsect called Addison-Wesley Longman became merged with Simon and Schuster to form a separate online educational site called Pearson Education.
Addison-Wesley Professional has published some of the most helpful and definitive materials on new technologies, as well as the use and furtherance of the technologies at hand. Some of their most popular works are on computer programming and include The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth, The Mythical Man-Moth by Fred P. Brooks Jr. and The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup. They continue to publish the leading sources on computing and the emergence of technologies that advance almost too quickly to keep up with demand.
To ensure that their books remain high-quality, cutting edge material, Addison-Wesley Professional releases multiple editions of the texts that need it most. As new technologies are being discovered and applied to the sciences, Addison-Wesley implements them into the new editions and thereby keeps the information consistently updated and available to the public. They also offer a rare possibility through Safari Books Online, where unpublished manuscripts are available for viewing and purchase. These books are called rough cuts and they are in various stages of completion. They can be used to follow the evolution of HTML formatting, data processing and computer programming.
Besides computer programming texts, Addison-Wesley Professional also offers a variety of educational texts in a range of subjects. They cover mathematics, physics, economics, statistics, finances and astronomy. Their imprints are represented through InformIT.com, which is a Pearson-based website that features Information Technology materials.
Addison-Wesley Professional isn’t just the publishing company that produced the definitive computing texts in the 80s and 90s. They are currently the leading technical publishers with the highest standards and expert material.