Sanders Publishes His 60th Book

William Sanders, professor of Multimedia Web Design and Development, is one of the University’s most prolific faculty members, having recently published his 59th and 60th books.

Flash CS4 All-In-One (Wiley, 2009), co-authored with Doug Sahlin, is a 640-page book examining the newest version of Flash and ActionScript 3.0. ASP.NET 3.5: A Beginner’s Guide (McGraw-Hill, 2009) is a new 480-page book examining the ASP.NET structure for creating online databases and other back-end elements in server-side computing.

Sanders' books, which are in the fields of sociology and computers/technology, have been translated into more than a dozen languages in total, including German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Romanian, Polish, and more. You can find a complete list of his books at http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/WSANDERS.

Sanders holds a PhD in sociology, and he got his start writing books while he was a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He put together a research methods reader to be used as a textbook, titled The Sociologist as Detective (New York, Praeger, 1974), which eventually went into a second edition. Following the publication of that book, Sanders’ editor, Gladys Topkis (who eventually became the senior editor at Yale University Press) asked him to write a book on Juvenile Delinquency (New York, Praeger, 1976) for a new series. That book also went into a second edition.

Sanders went on to write several books which were designed to inject sociological concepts into the field of criminal justice, and which covered the administration of the legal system from a sociological perspective. One of those books, Detective Work: A Study of Criminal Investigations (Macmillan, 1977), was nominated for the C. Wright Mills Award. It was also mentioned in one of Faye Kellerman's novels, The Ritual Bath.

In 1980 Sanders contracted to write a criminology text with Addison-Wesley, and he used the advance to buy a computer. After writing eight books using a typewriter, he began writing his first book using a word processor! While teaching research methods and writing books on the topic, Sanders kept bumping into computer programming used in data analysis. In 1982 he tried his hand at writing a programming book for the Apple computer, titled The Elementary Apple. It was essentially an introductory book on writing programs in a language called BASIC. Because all of the computers at that time had different versions of BASIC, he ended up writing several programming books, one for each type of computer ranging from the Apple to the Timex Sinclair – a computer with only 1k of memory!

The longest it has taken Sanders to write a book is 12 years. In 1980, Sanders began doing research on gangs in San Diego. When he finally finished in 1992, he was an associate dean at the University of Texas, El Paso, where he had rounded out his research with some data on El Paso gangs. When the book came out in 1994, the dean, assistant dean, and associate dean (Sanders) of the College of Liberal Arts all had books published at the same time, a fact that was noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

While at the University of Hartford, Sanders has published 18 books, beginning in 2000. In large measure this has been due to the establishment of the University’s Multimedia Web Design and Development (MWDD) program. Sanders became very interested in technology-based learning, and published Creating Learning-Centered Courses for the World Wide Web (Waltham, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001). In addition, Sanders, together with University faculty members Steve Misovich, Jerry Katrichis, and David Demers, authored a book for one of the MWDD introductory courses, An Introduction to Interactive Multimedia (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2003). Sanders and Associate Professor Terri Albert of the Barney School of Business wrote E-Business Marketing (New York: Prentice-Hall, 2003), based on Albert’s research. And together with faculty member Chandima Cumaranatunge, he wrote ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns (Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2007). Sanders’ most recent book, ASP.NET 3.5: A Beginner's Guide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009) was designed for MWD 310, which will be offered in the spring.