Acknowledgments

It takes a team to develop this type of book, and I want our team members to know how appreciated their time, ideas, and effort have been. This team effort is what sets blogging apart from publishing, and I fully acknowledge the team at Addison-Wesley, in particular my editors Joan Murray and Olivia Basegio for their patience and wisdom.

To my technical reviewers, Nick Paldino, Derik Whittaker, Steve Danielson, Peter Ritchie, and Tanzim Saqib—thank you for your insights and suggestions to improve accuracy and clarity. Each of you had major impact on the text and code examples contained in this book.

Some material throughout this book, at least in spirit, was obtained by reading the many blog postings from Microsoft staff and skilled individuals from our industry. In particular I’d like to thank the various contributors to the Parallel FX team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/), notably Igor Ostrovsky (strongly influenced my approach to aggregations), Ed Essey (helped me understand the different partitioning schemes used in PLINQ), and Stephen Toub. Stephen Toub also has my sincere thanks for giving feedback on the Parallel LINQ chapter during its development (Chapter 9), which dramatically improved the content accuracy and depth.

I would also like to acknowledge founders and contributors to Geonames.org (http://geonames.org), whose massive set of geographic data is available for free download under creative commons attribution license. This data is used in Chapter 9 to test PLINQ performance on large data sets.

Editing isn’t easy, and I’d like to acknowledge the patience and great work of Anne Goebel and Chrissy White in making my words flow from post-tech review to production. I know there are countless other staff who touched this book in its final stages of production, and although I don’t know your names, thank you.

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge readers like you for investing your time to gain a deeper understanding of LINQ to Objects. I hope after reading it you agree that this book offers valuable insights on how to use LINQ to Objects in real projects and that the examples go that step further in explaining the patterns that make LINQ an integral part of day-to-day programming from this day forward. Thank you.