ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this first book has been a tremendous effort. Looking back, I had no clue how crazy this journey would be but also no idea how fulfilling it would turn out to be.

They say that if you want to go fast you should go alone, but that if you want to go far you should go together. This is the fourth edition of the original book I wrote, and I would not have made it here without the people who helped along the way. This is a team effort and I would like to thank everyone who participated.

Most of the interviewees gave me their time and trust without a second thought, and I owe a lot of what we teach in this book to them: Doug Hellmann for his great advice about building libraries, Joshua Harlow for his good humor and knowledge about distributed systems, Christophe de Vienne for his experience in building frameworks, Victor Stinner for his incredible CPython knowledge, Dimitri Fontaine for his database wisdom, Robert Collins for messing up with testing, Nick Coghlan for his work in getting Python into better shape, and Paul Tagliamonte for his amazing hacker spirit.

Thanks to the No Starch crew for working with me on bringing this book to a brand new level — especially to Liz Chadwick for her editing skills, Laurel Chun for keeping me on track, and Mike Driscoll for his technical insight.

My gratitude also goes to the free software communities who shared their knowledge and helped me grow, especially to the Python community which always has been welcoming and enthusiastic.