This book would never have been written without the guidance and encouragement we received from a number of supportive individuals, including our editorial team, coworkers, friends, and family. We’d like to thank the Android developer community, Google, and the Open Handset Alliance for their vision and expertise. Throughout this project, our editorial team at Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley) always had the right mix of professionalism and encouragement. Thanks especially to Trina MacDonald, Olivia Basegio, and Songlin Qiu and our crack team of technical reviewers: Dan Galpin, Tony Hillerson, and Ronan Schwarz. We’d also like to thank Chris Haseman and Chris King for their early book input and Ray Rischpater for his longtime encouragement and advice on technical writing. Amy Badger must be commended for her wonderful illustrations and Hans Bodlaender for letting us use the nifty chess font he developed as a hobby project.

We’d also like to extend a special thanks to Professor Tracy Larrabee, who once taught a fateful class titled “Technical Writing for Computer Engineers” at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tracy did her utmost to ensure that computer science and engineering students graduated with the ability to write understandable business correspondence and readable technical specifications. If we wrote anything coherent in this book, you should thank her. If we messed up, it’s totally not her fault because we didn’t let her review it first (Shane says, “out of fear”). Incidentally, this course was one of the first Shane and Lauren took together back in college and can be considered where they first “met.”

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge and thank Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for continually reminding us of the dangers of shameless book promotion. Guys, this is your “Darcey/Conder bump”—milk it for all it’s worth.