Acknowledgments

Although I’ve written this book in my spare time, I’ve tried to minimize, as much as possible, time stolen from my family by working on it late at night and early in the morning. In some cases, though, this hasn’t been possible, so I thank my wife Estrella and my daughters Bianca and Clio for their patience and support. I look forward to spending more time with them now that the project is complete.

Before I became the author of this book, I’d already been a longtime reader of Manning books, so I was delighted when Manning gave me the chance to write for them. In particular, I’d like to thank Michael Stephens for getting this project started and placing it on the right track from the beginning, Marjan Bace for believing in it, Candace West for guiding me throughout the whole journey, and Bert Bates for making sure I was moving in the right direction. I’d also like to thank Ivan Martinović for coordinating the review process and Candace Gillhoolley, Ana Romac, Marko Rajkovic, and Christopher Kauffman for promoting the book. The reviewers who read the manuscript at varying stages of development and for whose comments and insight I am grateful include Alan Lenton, Arnaud Bailly, Duncan McRae, Garry Turkington, Godfred Asamoah, Gopala Krishna, James Nyika, Joel Kotarski, Jose San Leandro, Jürgen Hötzel, Massimo Dalla, Matthew Kiser, Michael Bright, Nasser Ugoji, Olivier Ducatteeuw, Rahul Rai, Tatiana Fesenko, Tomo Helman, Vinod Panicker, Vittal Damaraju, Win Lwin Oo, and Zhuo Hong Wei.

The content of the book has been considerably improved thanks to immensely useful feedback received from early readers, reviewers, technical editors, and key members of the Ethereum community. First of all, I’d like to thank Rehan Malik, a longtime friend of mine, for thoroughly reviewing the first draft of each chapter before I sent it to anyone else. The very detailed feedback that Alfredo Ielpo provided has contributed to clarifying and simplifying the first part of the book and making it more readable. Special thanks to Dr. David Buján, lecturer and researcher in the faculty of engineering at the University of Deusto, and Oscar Lage, head of cybersecurity and blockchain researcher at Tecnalia, who have helped me refine both terminology and explanations, especially for the more theoretical topics. A big thank you as well to my technical reviewers. The book wouldn’t have been as complete and accurate as it is without the invaluable feedback of my technical development editor, Alain Couniot, to whom I am very grateful, and my technical proofer, Kumar Unnikrishnan, who identified a few bugs in my code and patiently tested the fixes before the book went to production. I would also like to thank Anthony Calcara for coordinating production very smoothly and particularly thank Carl Quesnel, my copy editor, and Melody Dolab, my proofreader, for polishing the text and perfecting the fine details.

Finally, the friendly Ethereum community has also lent me a big hand. First of all, I’d like to thank Nick Johnson, the creator of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), for reviewing my coverage of ENS and of smart contract upgradeability. I also wish to thank Dr. Christian Reitwiessner, lead of Solidity and of the C++ client at Ethereum, for his feedback on chapters on Solidity and smart contracts. Many thanks to Thomas Bertani and his team at Oraclize, who have always been very kind and helpful since I met them in the early days of this adventure. I am also grateful to Tom Lindeman from ConsenSys Diligence for allowing me to reference content from their “Ethereum Smart Contract Best Practices” guide and for providing me with useful information on contract security. Finally, I’d like to thank Josh Quintal from Truffle for coordinating an internal review of my coverage of their tools.