Michael Wayne Morrison (born August 24, 1970) is an American author, software developer, and toy inventor. He is best known for his books on topics including Internet design and development, mobile device usage, and

game programming Game programming, a subset of game development, is the software development of video games. Game programming requires substantial skill in software engineering and computer programming in a given language, as well as specialization in one or mor ...

. Morrison's writing career began in the early 1990s and coincided with the release of the

Java programming language Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers ''write once, run anywh ...

. He embraced the Java technology and wrote and contributed to numerous Java books, as well as developing several online Java courses. His first book was actually ''Windows 95 Game Developer's Guide Using the Game SDK'', which was the first book to explore and demystify Microsoft's new (at the time)

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

game development technology. He co-authored his first book with his close friend and former college roommate, the late Randy Weems, who Morrison credits with a great deal of his technical knowledge. Morrison quickly followed up this book by serving as lead author of ''Java Unleashed'', which quickly became a best-seller. He went on to write books on numerous Web-related technologies such as

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, and also ventured into end-user writing by authoring books on

Pocket PC A Pocket PC (P/PC, PPC) is a class of personal digital assistant (PDA) that runs the Windows Mobile or Windows Embedded Compact operating system that has some of the abilities of modern desktop PCs. The name was introduced by Microsoft in 2000 ...

BlackBerry The blackberry is an edible fruit produced by many species in the genus ''Rubus'' in the family Rosaceae, hybrids among these species within the subgenus ''Rubus'', and hybrids between the subgenera ''Rubus'' and ''Idaeobatus''. The taxonomy of ...

, and Treo handheld devices. Morrison was born in

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the List of muni ...

. He has a B.A. from

Tennessee Technological University Tennessee Technological University, commonly referred to as Tennessee Tech, is a public research university in Cookeville, Tennessee, United States. It was formerly known as Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, and before that as University of Dixie ...

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, although he credits the school with little beyond serving as the place where he met his wife and a handful of close friends.

Bibliography

* ''Windows 95 Game Developer's Guide'' * ''Java Unleashed'' * ''Teach Yourself Internet Game Programming with Java in 21 Days'' * ''Tricks of the Java Programming Gurus'' * ''Presenting ActiveX'' * ''Java Developer's Reference'' * ''Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days Professional Reference Edition'' * ''VBScript Web Page Interactivity'' * ''Late Night Visual J++'' * ''Presenting JavaBeans'' * ''How to Program JavaBeans'' * ''Java 1.1 Unleashed, 3rd Edition'' * ''Microsoft Visual InterDev Unleashed'' * ''Teach Yourself More Java in 21 Days'' * ''Professional Edition Using HTML 4, XML, and Java 1.2'' * ''Java 1.2 Class Libraries Unleashed'' * ''The Complete Idiot's Guide to Java 2'' * ''Teach Yourself MFC in 24 Hours'' * ''MFC Programming with Visual C++ 6 Unleashed'' * ''Teach Yourself DirectX 7 in 24 Hours'' * ''Teach Yourself Windows Script Host in 21 Days'' * ''XML Unleashed'' * ''IE 5 Web Programming Unleashed'' * ''Unauthorized Guide to Pocket PC'' * ''Java 2 in Plain English'' * ''Teach Yourself Wireless Java with J2ME in 21 Days'' * ''HTML and XML for Beginners'' * ''Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, 2nd Edition'' * ''Special Edition Using Pocket PC 2002'' * ''Teach Yourself SVG in 24 Hours'' * ''Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours'' * ''Faster Smarter HTML and XML'' * ''Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML in 24 Hours, 6th Edition'' * ''JavaScript Bible, 5th Edition'' * ''Beginning Game Programming'' * ''Beginning Mobile Phone Game Programming'' * ''BlackBerry In a Snap'' * ''Treo Essentials'' * ''Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, 3rd Edition'' * ''Teach Yourself HTML & CSS in 24 Hours'' * ''Head First JavaScript''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Morrison, Michael American technology writers American computer programmers 1970 births Living people Tennessee Technological University alumni Writers from Nashville, Tennessee