Acknowledgments

Writing a book is a collective effort. In the world of programming, where technologies come and go at a frenetic pace, it would be unrealistic to expect to write a book without a lot of external help, as this would make the book obsolete the moment it was published.

First, I would like to thank my development editors at Manning, Susan Conant and Dan Maharry. They taught me how to write a book and to develop content that is technically sound but also interesting and entertaining to the reader. They are the two people who spent a lot of time with me, explaining what it takes to write a good book and guiding me from the first draft until the final printed book.

Creating a book entails a lot of tasks other than writing the body of the text. Thankfully, I didn’t have to concern myself with most of these tasks because a huge army of Manning personnel was there for me. I owe a lot to Kevin Sullivan, Mary Piergies, Janet Vail, Candace Gillhoolley, Aleksandar Dragosavljevic, Keith Conant, Francesco Bianchi, Sharon Wilkey, Melody Dolab, Toma Mulligan, and Gordan Salinovic for allowing me to focus on writing while they took care of layout, graphics, technical reviewing, proofreading, and marketing.