Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the many reviewers, colleagues, and others who have read and commented on our early chapter drafts, especially Aaron Colcord, Aaron Schumacher, Ambikesh Jayal, Bryce Darling, Dwight Barry, Fred Rahmanian, Hans Donner, Jeelani Basha, Justin Fister, Dr. Kostas Passadis, Leo Polovets, Marius Butuc, Nathanael Adams, Nezih Yigitbasi, Pablo Vaselli, Peter Rabinovitch, Ravishankar Rajagopalan, Rodrigo Abreu, Romit Singhai, Sampath Chaparala, and Zekai Otles. Their comments, questions, and corrections have greatly improved this book. Special thanks to George Gaines for his thorough technical review of the manuscript shortly before it went into production.

We especially would like to thank our development editor, Cynthia Kane, for all her advice and patience as she shepherded us through the writing process. The same thanks go to Benjamin Berg, Katie Tennant, Kevin Sullivan, and all the other editors at Manning who worked hard to smooth out the rough patches and technical glitches in our text.

In addition, we’d like to thank our colleague David Steier, Professors Anno Saxenian and Doug Tygar from UC Berkeley’s School of Information Science, as well as all the other faculty and instructors who have reached out to us about the possibility of using this book as a teaching text.

We’d also like to thank Jim Porzak for inviting one of us (John Mount) to speak at the Bay Area R Users Group, for being an enthusiastic advocate of our book, and for contributing the foreword. On days when we were tired and discouraged and wondered why we had set ourselves to this task, his interest helped remind us that there’s a need for what we’re offering and for the way that we’re offering it. Without his encouragement, completing this book would have been much harder.