Acknowledgments

Gone are the days where one needs to set the stage with “computers are everywhere” or “computers are a commodity.” Clearly, computers are everywhere, are used by everyone, and permeate every daily function and activity. Unfortunately, the majority of society can only use ready-made computer applications; they cannot program computers. With this book, we intend to change that!

In authoring this book, a five-year process, we benefited from and are grateful for the help of many; here we name but a few and apologize to those whose help we inadvertently forgot to acknowledge by name.

We thank all the students who persevered through the many instantiations of this text, from those who read the initial chapters over and over and over again as part of IIT’s offerings. Their comments, suggestions, and criticisms guided our corrections through the iterations.

The entire production of this book, from the first partial drafts to the final version delivered to O’Reilly, was managed by two students, initially by Yacin Nadji (a doctoral student at Georgia Tech) and more recently by Andrew Yates (a doctoral student at Georgetown University). Without their help, we would have stumbled over one another, and we would have given up the effort many times over.

We use and envision others will use our book in the classroom. To aid instruction, we provide corresponding slides that would not exist without the help of two Georgetown University students, Candice Penelton and Sarah Chang.

We benefited from many editorial remarks; we thank the editorial changes suggested by Becca Page, the anonymous reviewers, and most notably, Mike Fitzgerald, who not only reviewed the book word by word, but also tested our code. We also thank Jason Soo for his periodic assistance with the Ruby source code and Abdur Chowdhury for his general guidance and assistance. Likewise, we thank the entire O’Reilly production team, who went way beyond what could be expected and significantly improved this book.

Finally and foremost, we thank our family members whose support and tolerance helped us through our jointly endured struggles (for David: Mary Catherine, Isaac, and Joseph; for Gideon: Dalia; and for Ophir: Nazli).