If there is one person who must be acknowledged, it is Jim Huddleston, the editor of the first edition of this book. Jim was there from the beginning. He helped me get it commissioned, he worked with me to figure out the contents, he gave me much-needed encouragement and constructive criticism, and his skillful editing helped me convey the information effectively. Sadly, Jim died on Sunday, 25th February 2007, just as the orginal book was entering its final stages of production.

I feel very lucky to have worked on this project with my technical reviewer, Michael de la Maza, and lucky as well to have worked with the technical reviewer of the first edition, Don Syme, who went above and beyond the cause by contributing many ideas to the original book; his influence can still be seen in this edition.

Don, of course, is the creator and developer of F#, and I'd like to thank him and all the other members of the small but dedicated F# team. Specifically, I'd like to thank them for their hard work on the compiler, and to let them know that their quick responses to bugs and queries were very much appreciated.

I'm also indebted to the entire F# community, in particular, to Stephan Tolksdorf, who was a great help with the FParsec examples; André van Meulebrouck, who sent me many corrections; and Chance Coble for his encouragement and excellent foreword. And I'm grateful to Chris Barwick (a.k.a. optionsScalper) for his continued work on hubFS (http://cs.hubfs.net).

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone at Apress who took part in creating this book.

A number of people had to put up with me while I wrote this book, and they deserve special thanks. This includes my family: Mum, Dad, and sister, who got used to me sneaking off to write whenever I went to visit them; my work colleagues when writing the original book: Arnaud, Aurélie, Baptiste, Buuloc, Daniel, Dennis, Emmanuel, Fabrice, François, Frederik, Guillaume, Ibrahima, Jean-Marc, Laurent, Lionel, Oussama, Patrice, Philippe, Regis, Sebastien J., Sebastien P., Stefaan, Stefany, and Stephane; the people who helped keep me distracted in Geneva: Amy, Angela, Armand, Carmen, Emma, Erika, Francisco, Giovanna, Jordi, Laurent, Mattias, Peter, and Sameera; and the people I'm working with on my current project: Charels, Francois, Kyrylo, and Stefan. Last but by no means least, heartfelt thanks to my wife, Susan, for all the help and support she has given. Without her understanding, this book could never have happened.