Herbert Leeds was an IBM programmer and colleague of gerald-weinberg during Weinberg's early years at ibm-federal-systems-division. Leeds co-authored computer-programming-fundamentals-1961, the textbook that became Weinberg's first published book, based on course material developed for IBM's internal training programs.
The collaboration with Leeds placed Weinberg in the position of synthesizing and communicating programming knowledge at a moment when the discipline was still being invented. The book appeared the same year as Weinberg's work on project-mercury-1959 was winding down, and it represents the earliest expression of Weinberg's lifelong conviction that programming is a teachable, communicable human activity—the seed of what would become programming-as-human-activity and eventually psychology-of-computer-programming-1971.
Leeds recedes from the historical record after this collaboration; his significance is primarily as a marker of Weinberg's early IBM context and as co-originator of a textbook that reached a generation of programmers at the dawn of the software profession.