I had a wonderful time writing this book, which is largely due to the skill and dedication of the people who worked with me on it and the patience of the people who put up with me. Those who fall into both camps are virtuous beyond words.

My family has borne the brunt of the time I spent writing when I should have been playing, sleeping, or just being more sociable. My wife Holly has been more supportive than I have any right to expect, and I’m both proud and slightly disturbed that the eyes of my sons Tom, William, and Robin light up as soon as a laptop is opened.

As well as the formal peer reviewers listed in a moment, I would like to mention Emma Middlebrook and Douglas Leeder, both of whom read significant portions of the original manuscript before it even reached my editor. Emma has the remarkable bad luck of having had to cope not only with reviewing my writing but also with working with me on a daily basis. Douglas freed himself from that drudgery a while ago, but was still kind enough to suggest improvements to the book without even knowing C#. You’re both dear friends, and I thank you for that even more than for your efforts on the book.

The folks at Manning have been supportive right from the start—particularly Jackie Carter’s original work with me, as well as Mike Stephens’ help at a high level throughout the process and Jeff Bleiel’s constant support and diligent editing. Liz Welch performed the near-impossible trick of making the copyediting process fun for both of us, and Karen Tegtmeyer kept me relatively sane during nail-biting peer reviews. These are only the people I got to know reasonably well during the last year; many other people were involved in the project, doing marvelous things: there’s the production team of Gordan Salinovic, Dottie Marsico, Tiffany Taylor, Katie Tennant, and Mary Piergies; cover designer Leslie Haimes; webmaster Gabriel Dobrescu, marketing director Ron Tomich, and last but not least, publisher Marjan Bace.

The aforementioned peer reviewers are a picky bunch. There’s no doubt in my mind that my life would have been easier without them—it’s really you, the reader, who should thank them for a much better end result in the book that you are now reading. They pushed, prodded, pulled, commented, questioned, and generally made thorough nuisances of themselves—which is exactly what they were asked to do—as they read the manuscript in its many iterations. So on your behalf I thank Dave Corun, Anil Radhakrishna, Riccardo Audano, Will Morse, Christopher Haupt, Robin Shahan, Mark Seeman, Peter A. Bromberg, Fabio Angius, Massimo Perga, Chris Mullins, JD Conley, Marc Gravell, Ross Bradbury, Andrew Seimer, Alex Thissen, Keith J. Farmer, Fabrice Marguerie, Josh Cronemeyer, and Anthony Jones.

I’ve been very fortunate over the years to make acquaintances (both online and in person) with many people who are far smarter than I am, and I consulted some of them for pieces of information in this book. For keeping my facts straight, I’d like to thank Jon Jagger, Nigel Perry, Prashant Sridharan, Dan Fernandez, Tony Goodhew, Simon Tatham, Ben Voigt, and George Chrysanthakopoulos.

Finally, I need to thank the C# team. As well as creating such a fantastic language to write about, they were incredibly responsive to my questions. I don’t know what’s coming in C#4 (beyond the hints on blogs about possible features) or even a very rough timescale for it, but I wish the team the very best of luck.

I’d like to pay special tribute to Eric Lippert, first for being willing to enter into detailed conversations about all kinds of topics while I was writing the initial manuscript, and then for acting as the technical reviewer for the book, and finally for agreeing to write the foreword. I couldn’t have asked for a more knowledgable and thorough reviewer—Eric is about as close to being the C# specification in human form as you can get! He’s also a great source of trivia and recommendations on coding style. Many of the comments Eric made when reviewing the book didn’t impact the text directly, but are pure gold nonetheless. Rather than keeping them to myself, I’ve incorporated them into the notes on the book’s website. Think of them as the literary equivalent of a DVD commentary track.