Acknowledgments

We thank each other for making this book possible. If only one of us was writing this book, it would have been either a random stream of consciousness or an obsessively organized masterpiece that would never have been finished in our lifetime.

We thank our technical reviewer, Dr. Jan Hartmann, from the University of Amsterdam Department of Geography, who went above and beyond the call of duty in reviewing all chapters of our book, testing the code, and providing invaluable constructive criticism. We’d also like to thank Paul Ramsey for contributing the foreword and our illustrators Gary Battiston and Alejandro Gomez.

We thank everyone at Manning Publications. In particular, we acknowledge Marjan Bace and Karen Tegtmeyer for reviewing our proposal, organizing reviewer feedback, and giving us the opportunity to be published authors; our development editor, Sebastian Stirling, who endured many revisions of our chapters; and our production team of Linda Recktenwald, Mary Piergies, Barbara Mirecki, and others for keeping us focused during the production process.

Our exposure to PostGIS would not be possible without the City of Boston Department of Neighborhood Development (DND), particularly the MIS and Policy Development and Research divisions where Regina first got exposed to GIS and PostGIS. A special thanks to fellow members of the PostGIS development team and Steering Committee: Kevin Neufeld, Mark Cave-Ayland, Paul Ramsey, Sandro Santilli, Nicklas Avén, Olivier Courtin, Mark Leslie, Mateusz Loskot, Pierre Racine, Jorge Arévalo, and others; each ensures that every new release of PostGIS has great features and that bug reports get immediate attention. We also thank the PostGIS community of newsgroup subscribers who answer questions as best and as quickly as they can, PostGIS bloggers, and package maintainers; each in their own way gives newcomers to PostGIS a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Finally, we thank our early access readers and reviewers who flagged errors and ambiguities in our text and code before publication, in particular, Brent Wood, Stephen Woodbridge, Dylan Beaudette, Rick Wagner, Sandro Santilli, Kevin Neufeld, James Fee, Paul Ramsey, Bruce Rindahl, Amos Bannister, Paolo Corti, Richard Greenwood, Bill Dollins, Pierre Racine, Mark Leslie, Mark Cave-Ayland, Andy Saurin, Dane Springmeyer, Katie Filbert, and Jeff Addison.