acknowledgments

First of all, I’d like to thank Daniel Zingaro, the first person in Manning who read my book proposal and believed it had potential, despite being submitted by a first-time author. Thanks to him, the proposal went through the initial review, and I signed the contract with Manning. Also, it was Daniel who suggested the title of the book.

The person who helped me the most was my development editor, Connor O’Brien. Before this book, I had experience in writing blog posts and preparing conference talks, so I was pretty self-confident, thinking that I knew how to deliver my thoughts to the reader. But a whole book is a completely different experience! You really need a professional, like Connor, who will guide you toward making the book well structured and understandable (but not boring!) for readers with different background knowledge. He was always convincing me to add more diagrams and tables to make the content easier to comprehend and sharing his ideas on what to draw there. If you like the figures in this book, you should thank Connor as well. Finally, he was very tolerant of the thousands of grammar mistakes, fixing the most blatant of them patiently to avoid scaring off the reviewers.