V. Anton Spraul has lived his entire life in Birmingham, Alabama, while somehow acquiring so little accent that locals assume he's from Ohio. He's an award-winning teacher with two degrees in computer science, and considers his nonfiction writing another form of teaching. His most popular book, Think Like a Programmer, combats a common malady for beginning programmers: the inability to write a complete, original program from scratch. “The book every programmer should read once” has fans around the globe and has been translated into five languages. Spraul maintains a blog on a range of topics and creates YouTube videos that extend the topics in his books. In his off-hours, he reads across a range of seriousness from economics texts to old-fashioned mysteries, records music, and plays games on computers he builds himself.