Acknowledgments

There are so many people to thank as this book was definitively a group project. Thanks first to Chris Beckett for helping get this book off the ground. Without Chris’s and Oscar’s original conversations, this book would never have been. Chris’s design and technical knowledge was utilized throughout the writing process. Thanks also to Benjamin Niaulin, who stepped in as a contributing author and really pulled through. We are not sure how we could have finished without him.

We have so many thanks to give to Apress for giving us the opportunity to write this book and for their constant support and guidance. This book would not have been completed without them. In particular we would like to thank our editors Chris Nelson and Jonathan Hassell, our coordinating editor Mark Powers who had the job of herding us, our copyeditor Teresa Horton, Anna Ishchenko, and SPi Global. We would also like to thank our technical editor, Sahil Malik, who provided such excellent technical feedback and witty comments that made every chapter, every section, and every paragraph that much clearer.

A special thanks is in order to Cloudshare (www.cloudshare.com). We wanted to offer a fully functional demonstration site that incorporates the material in this book to our readers. Cloudshare offered to provide a free trial of their services that includes a snapshot of our development environment for you to use. We greatly appreciate Cloudshare’s offer to help make the material in this book more accessible and ready to use to our readers.

Finally, we would like to thank our families, sponsors, significant others, coworkers, and friends for all of their support. We all sacrificed a lot to make this book what it is, but it was worth it. Thank you.