How a Master Programer became a Master Spell Slinger.

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Walter “Wiz” Zumwalt is a bit out of sorts. You see his day started off as normal where he went to his job fixing all the mistakes that the other programers made. It was a bit of a slog but someone usually came up with a entertaining way to make a program crash and Wiz usually came up with a equally entertaining way to fix it. This was also how Wiz got his nick name as it seemed sometimes he was working magic to get things working again. Life was normal and Wiz was content with computers since it meant that he didn't have to deal with people. Unfortunately for Wiz the Universe had other plans.

One minute he is untangling a stubborn line of code and the next he is dodging fireballs, backing away from the still smoldering corpse of the wizard that summoned him and being dragged to safety by a woman that he feels strangely attracted to even though he has never met her before.

What Wiz will find out is that he is a variable in a war that has been going on between the forces of light and darkness for a very long time. This world runs on magic and he has none. Strangely enough though a magic spell looks a lot like a computer program...

Though the premise of this book isn't exactly original it still manages to tell a entertaining tale of a fish out of water or in this case a fish finding itself in water and not quite knowing what to do with it. I liked this story as most of the characters actually seem like they could be real people. They have their flaws and there failings but they try to work through them and don't instantly always do the right thing. As Wiz struggles to find his place in his new world he eventually realizes that his actions have consequences and he has to take responsibility for those consequences, even if he isn’t directly responsible for what is going on. The book moves at a good clip and doesn't really have mood swings from comedy to dead serious like the wizard in yurt series or the rouge agent series. All in all a good read if your looking for a fantasy fish out of water book that is a little different from the norm.ma.c ( )

The 1st book of the series is not that great as most of the book is spent with Wiz whining about his being in a world without computers. He doesn't even clue in on it until the last 3rd of the book.
The 2nd book is better as Wiz and his programming buddies use both magic and computing to fight off a couple of computer hackers who found their way into the magical world. ( )

"Wiz" Zumwalt, a computer programmer,is having an ordinary day when suddenly he finds himself transported to a world where magic is real. The man who summoned him is dead and nobody knows why he was brought there. Wiz eventually realizes that magic can be performed using a scripting language not unlike DOS or UNIX commands.

This edition contains the first two books of the series "Wizard's Bane" and "Wizardry Compiled". In the first book we follow Wiz through his travels and struggles to figure out his place in the world and avoid the dark wizards out to get him. In the second book several programmers are recruited from the real world to develop and teach the new magical language dubbed "WIZ-DOS"

Being somewhat of a computer geek myself I found this book quite amusing. Despite being published more than 10 years ago the computer humor found within is still somewhat up to date.

The one small gripe I had with this edition is that there were numerous occurrences of dropped letters in the text. This appears to have been a printing error and was not done for slang or flavoring purposes. It didn't necessarily detract from the story it just broke the flow of reading from time to time. ( )

An omnibus edition of "Wizard's Bane" and "Wizardry Compiled".
Rick Cook shows us what woul dhappen if a computer programmer was transported into a magical world, and discovered that spells were just like programming.
In the first book we follow Wiz around the fantasy world, and watch his new brand of magic help defeat the dark wizards. In the second, Wiz takes a back seat whilst more of his fellow programmers are brought over on contract work to help fix the mess caused by his rather slapdash approach to magic programming in book one.
An interesting and amusing read, but one wonders how much more there is to explore in the further bokks in the series. ( )