Virginia Debolt

Virginia DeBolt grew up in southern Colorado, where her father often took her fishing and hunting. She can still walk off with a teddy bear from the shooting gallery at the fair. After receiving her college degrees, she taught in public schools in Colorado and New Mexico. Her first computer was a Commodore 64. The schools were using Apple IIe computers and Virginia quickly became the "computer person" in the school. Her first four books were written to teach writing using cooperative learning...See more

Virginia DeBolt grew up in southern Colorado, where her father often took her fishing and hunting. She can still walk off with a teddy bear from the shooting gallery at the fair. After receiving her college degrees, she taught in public schools in Colorado and New Mexico. Her first computer was a Commodore 64. The schools were using Apple IIe computers and Virginia quickly became the "computer person" in the school. Her first four books were written to teach writing using cooperative learning and are still in print and selling well. She graduated to a blazingly fast 8 MHz Mac Classic to celebrate her status as a working writer. In the mid-1990s, she moved to Texas and took some classes with the notion of finding work as a technical writer. One class was in HTML, and Virginia's life was never the same after that. HTML took over her thoughts, dreams, conversation, time, and energy. Soon she had a contract tech writing job by day, and a part time gig teaching HTML at the community college by night. The dining room of her home was filled with office tables and a web of wires between two Macs, two Windows boxes, assorted scanners, printers, and Zip drives. In the free time between her two jobs, she was making web sites for fun. The HTML teaching job sent her searching in places like SXSW Interactive conferences for answers and ideas. But what she heard in the conference halls and what she saw in the books that were available to teach HTML and Dreamweaver were 180 degrees apart. In 2001, she started writing reviews of these books on her blog at ... /> The Web Teacher blog brought her to the attention of computer book publishers. After contributing to books written by other people, she decided to write her own book to promote her theory that HTML and CSS should be taught as integrated skills, not as two distinct and separate ideas. The first book was Integrated HTML and CSS: A Smarter, Faster Way to Learn (Wiley, 2004). The second is the one you hold in your hand now. Oh, her latest computer? There's just one. A Mac laptop that needs almost no wires strung about and does Windows on demand. See less