Pogue's Bio: The long and the short of it

To my alarm, a couple of friendly hosts have introduced me at recent talks by reading my ENTIRE three-page bio, much to the boredom of the audience. So here's a short version (for introductions and busy people) as well as the long one (for airplane reading).

The short version

David Pogue is the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. Each week, he contributes a print column, an online column, an online video and a popular daily blog, “Pogue’s Posts.”

David is also an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News, and he appears each week on CNBC with his trademark comic tech videos.

With over 3 million books in print, David is one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “for Dummies” series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music); in 1999, he launched his own series of complete, funny computer books called the Missing Manual series, which now includes over 100 titles.

David graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1985, with distinction in Music, and he spent ten years conducting and arranging Broadway musicals in New York. In 2007, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Shenandoah Conservatory.

He’s been profiled on both “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes.” He lives with his wife and three young children in Connecticut. His web site is www.davidpogue.com.

The whole enchilada

David Pogue grew up in Shaker Heights, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. (Mom's the Welcome Wagon lady; dad's a lawyer.) He was a music/theatre geek from Day 1, starring in, composing, playing piano for, or conducting musicals and choirs from elementary school through high school. He was also a language jock, winning the Ohio Spelling Bee in 1977, and a magician, performing over 400 magic shows during his teen years.

He studied music, English, and computer science at Yale. He graduated summa cum laude in 1985, with Distinction in Music, having continued to write and conduct musicals each year. (In 2007, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from the Shenandoah Conservatory. So that's "Dr. Pogue" to you, bud.)

After college, Pogue moved to New York City, with aspirations to compose Broadway shows. He worked as conductor, synthesizer programmer, arranger, or assistant on several Broadway shows (Carrie, Welcome to the Club, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Anything Goes at Lincoln Center) and a few Off-Broadway ones (Pajama Game, Godspell, and Flora, the Red Menace, which he also orchestrated).

In the interests of hedging his bets, he also founded and taught, for several years, the beginning magic courses at the New School for Social Research and New York's Learning Annex. He also codesigned and wrote the manuals for music software programs like Finale, from Coda Music Technology.

Unfortunately, the demand for new young composers on Broadway is about zero these days, and Pogue saw the writing on the wall; through this time, his computer-teaching skills were turning out to be in more demand than his musical ones. So he started teaching the Broadway community how to use their Macs -- first composers such as Stephen Sondheim, John Kander, Jerry Bock, David Shire, and Cy Coleman, and then later Hollywood and literary celebrities, from Mia Farrow to Harry Connick, Jr.

He began writing for Macworld magazine in 1988. His triple-award-winning column, "The Desktop Critic," appeared on the back page until November 2000, when he joined The Times.

In 1992, IDG Books asked Pogue to write Macs for Dummies. (This was back when there was only one Dummies book -- DOS for Dummies.) The book quickly became the #1 bestselling Macintosh book, and remained so, month after month, ever since -- in all of its 17 languages and six editions.

He wound up becoming a ridiculously prolific author, writing or co-writing 7 books in the “for Dummies” series (including Opera, Classical Music, and Magic), six editions of the 1,300-page bestseller Macworld Mac Secrets (co-authored with former Yale roommate Joe Schorr) and a novel, Hard Drive (a New York Times "notable book of the year"). In 1998, his PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide became the #1 bestselling Palm book.

In 2000, Pogue created the Missing Manual series: a line of superbly written, printed manuals for computer products that don't come with any--in other words, "the book that should have been in the box." The series, published in collaboration with O'Reilly & Associates, now includes over 100 titles, includes bestsellers on topics like Mac OS X, the iPhone, Windows XP and Vista, Dreamweaver, iMovie, iPhoto, Microsoft Office, and others.

In November 2000, Pogue became the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. (His Times column, "State of the Art," appears every Thursday on the front page of the Business section.) Soon thereafter, he began writing his daily Times blog, "Pogue's Posts," authoring a weekly e-mail Times newsletter, "From the Desk of David Pogue," and shooting his double-award-winning, very silly Times Web videos.

Pogue appears frequently on radio and TV. For several years, he was a regular technology guest on Martha Stewart's pre-jail TV show and on NPR's "Morning Edition"; today, he appears weekly on CNBC's "Power Lunch," monthly on CNBC's "On the Money," and about six times a year on "CBS News Sunday Morning." In 2004, his "Sunday Morning" segments on Google and the spam problem won a 2004 Business Emmy.

Pogue lives with his wife Jennifer Pogue, MD, son Kelly, daughter Tia, and son Jeffrey, in Connecticut, where he entertains them with magic tricks, piano playing, and a lifelong stream of appalling puns.