Male that PROBABLY dead tree. Story is set in a fantasy world. As often happens in this type of story our hero is summoned from our earth to save everybody.
The only unique thing I remember is that they bring more people over later, but these are Ren Faire and SCA types. The SCA guys think they are hot stuff, but get schooled in training against actual soldiers.
My memories of this are at least twenty years old.
Very minor scene in Rick Cook's Wizardry Compiled. The Author is definite the book MAY be wrong. In the first of the series the mc, a high level computer programmer, was shanghaied to a magical universe where he destroyed the bad guys with a spell interpreter. In book two (WC) he gets kidnapped while creating a spell compiler and the Council of the Wise get more programmers. One has a thing for dragons and finds out they are nasty creatures, and another sees battle practice and thinks it is like SCA rattan -its not its combat. So Wizardry Compiled is my final answer. It is correct, but it may not be what you want.
Good Hunting, limab
That sounds right. Title and author both. I'll have to dig through my thousands of boxed books.
They were published by Baen, so there are epub versions available if you can't find the physical ones. Cost ranges from $4 to $7 per title. Baen was an early adopter of digital books, long before most publishers got into it.
The second also has a great joke about a spell which slows time inside an area but is considered useless since it only works at night. The group of old-school programmers find the local equivalent of caffeine and have the locals cast that spell on their workspace, allowing them to triple output.
The series had 5 books between 1989 and 1996, then in 2000 Cook had heart surgery and had to go on post-op drugs that in his words made it impossible to write fiction. In 2008 he posted the incomplete work, "The Wizardry Capitalized," on his blog.
Although I loved the first Wiz book and thought the second was fun, I honestly can't recall if I read #s 3-5 or not.
