Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the many, many people at Manning Publications who helped usher this book into being. In particular, three individuals helped us immeasurably in transforming, and in many cases, redirecting our writing to produce the much better result you are reading now. Marina Michaels, our development editor from the beginning, tirelessly marked up our chapters with great technical questions despite being brand new to both Spark and graphs. Michael Roberts, our technical development editor for most of the process, was equally as profuse as Marina with his suggestions, but also brought technical expertise to the task. Antonio Magnaghi, our technical proofreader, went above and beyond by proofing not just the source code, but by effectively providing an extra technical development editor pass over the text of the whole book.

We would also like to thank the many reviewers who read early drafts of the book and provided helpful suggestions, including Andy Petrella, Brent Foust, Charles Feduke, Gaurav Bhardwaj, Jason Kolter, Justin Fister, Michael Bright, Paul-Michael Sorhaindo, Rodrigo Abreu, Romi Kuntsman, Sumit Pal, and Vincent Liard.

Michael Malak thanks his wife and children for their patience during the long months of preparing this manuscript.

Robin East thanks his wife Jane and their two boys. They put up with his strange writing hours and habit of disappearing upstairs at odd times.