Acknowledgements

It has been a privilege to write this book, successfully accomplished with the cooperation and help of many individuals. Our sincere gratitude to each one of them goes beyond any barriers. We would like to take this opportunity to express our regards and henceforth urge the reader to take a few minutes to read this section before moving onto the rest of this book.

We, as faculty members of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Calcutta, are indebted to our colleagues and students. Their inspiration and constant support was a driving force that requires special mention. Dr Rajib Das played an instrumental role in supporting us with some programming problems and debugging them wherever required.

Sanjit Bhattacharjee, an ex-student of our department, presently with Cognizant Technology Solutions (San Francisco, CA) as a Systems Designer Lead—Data warehousing, gave some invaluable suggestions and helped in shaping this book. Bigyan Bhar, a student of our department, presently an M.Tech. student of Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, came up with new valuable suggestions, which were judiciously incorporated in our book. He also helped in framing some of the appendices.

Debanjana Banerjee, a competent technical assistant of our department, helped in testing many of the programs provided in the book. A special mention to Sovonesh Das and Kaushik Mondal is required for their inspiration and interest behind this book.

We would like to heartily thank Sachin Saxena and Gaurav Jain of Pearson Education who managed to decipher our work and prepared this book with utmost accuracy.

Finally, we are thankful to our families and friends for being supportive and who uncomplainingly beared with our preoccupation.

K. N. Dey

S. K. Bandyopadhyay