Developer's Guide to Hp Printers

Rating:
Summary: "Guide to HP printers for Dummies" would be a better title
Review: Alas, only about 100 of 400 pages of this book contain useful information about printers. The rest includes such things as quotes from the factory manuals which are included with the printers anyway, description of the Forth programming language (a version named PAL in the book) and printout of the implementation of Forth. Because of this the useful part is extremely terse. It just lists the printer commands but provides very little descriptions. The reader is expected to find out what the phrases like "pattern 6" mean all by him/herself. Many commands are not described at all, the book just says "you don't need to know the details". None of the examples show the printed output. The description of PCL6 loudly advertised on the cover is almost literally "PCL6 does exist but HP does not disclose any details". This attitude could be understandable in a "for dummies" series book but not in a "developer's" book. Still, the book is not completely useless: it gives some initial information for experiments and is much cheaper than the HP manuals.

Rating:
Summary: Covers PCL from a developers prespective.
Review: This book covers various versions of PCL used in DeskJet and Laser Jet printers. It also provides general information on HP printers. The provided application (Printer Application Language) allows users to learn PCL by generating PCL code in plain English. This book appears to be a valuable tool for quickly learning about PCL. It is the most recent PCL book (c 1998) I have encountered.