Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone at Manning who made this book possible: publisher Marjan Bace and everyone on the editorial and production teams, including Janet Vail, Kevin Sullivan, Tiffany Taylor, Dottie Marsico, Linda Recktenwald, and many others who worked behind the scenes.

Thanks also to all the reviewers of this manuscript in its various stages: Nii A-Okine, Tobias Bürger, Marius Butuc, Carlton Gibson, John Guthrie, Pieter Gyselinck, Peter-John Hampton, Dike Kalu, Seth Liddy, Radha Ranjan Madhav, Kostas Passadis, Peter Rabinovitch, Srdjan Santic, Dennis Sellinger, Dr. Joseph Wang, and Michael Williams. We know how much time and effort it takes to read and re-read such a text, so thanks to you all. You provided invaluable feedback that is now reflected in the text.

A special thanks must go to David Fombella Pombal for providing an invaluable technical review, to Dr. Michael Davy for reviewing chapter 3, and to Matthew Sword for reviewing chapter 7. Thank you all.

In this book, we draw on many systems, libraries, and packages that weren’t written by us. The community of developers, data scientists, and machine-learning experts working in this field do us all credit. Thank you, each and every one of you.