John Arthorne and Chris Laffra observed, “It takes a village to write a book on Eclipse.” In the case of the BIRT books, it has taken a virtual village in four countries to create these two books. Our contributors, reviewers, Addison-Wesley editorial, marketing, and production staff, printers, and proofreaders are working in Austin, Boston, Closter, Indianapolis, Inman, Los Angeles, Paris, San Francisco, San Jose, Shanghai, South San Francisco, Upper Saddle River, and Windsor.

We want to thank Greg Doench, our acquisitions editor, who asked us to write a book about BIRT and has been holding his breath ever since to see if we could possibly make the schedule that we set for ourselves. Of course, we want to acknowledge the staff at Addison-Wesley who are working to support our schedule. In particular, we would like to acknowledge John Fuller, Mary Kate Murray, Julie Nahil, Sandra Schroeder, and Beth Wickenhiser. We also want to thank Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Foundation and Mark Coggins at Actuate Corporation for providing the forewords for the books.

We particularly want to acknowledge the many, many managers, designers, and programmers too numerous to name who have worked diligently to produce BIRT, giving us a reason for these two books. You know who you are and know how much we value your efforts. The following technical staff members at Actuate Corporation have been of particular assistance to the authors: Linda Chan, Wenbin He, Petter Ivmark, Rima Kanguri, Nina Li, Wenfeng Li, Yu Li, Jianqiang Luo, David Michonneau, Kai Shen, Aniruddha Shevade, Pierre Tessier, Krishna Venkatraman, Mingxia Wu, Gary Xue, Jun Zhai, and Lin Zhu. In addition, we want to acknowledge the support and significant contribution that was provided by Paul Rogers.

Creating this book would not have been possible without the constant support of the members of the Developer Communications team at Actuate Corporation. Many of them and their families sacrificed long personal hours to take on additional tasks so that members of the team of authors could create this material. In particular, we wish to express our appreciation to two writers who contributed original material for these books. Mary Adler wrote the initial version of “Adding Interactive Viewing Features.” Tigger Newman wrote material about accessing data sources, working with data sets, filtering data, and using parameters for release 1.0.1, which were the basis of several chapters in the first published edition. Paul Reeves revised that material for that same edition. Terry Ryan pulled together the terminology in the glossary that accompanies each of the books. In addition, Frances Buran, Chris Dufour, Bruce Gardner, Wennie Huang, Richard Kang, Melia Kenny, Cheryl Koyano, Madalina Lungulescu, Liesbeth Matthieu, Audrey Meinertzhagen, and Lois Olson all contributed to the success of the books.