Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the people who contributed to making this book a reality. Our management at A9.com actively supported this project from the beginning. Bill Stasior initiated the creation of the course this book is based on, and selected the topic from among several options we offered. Brian Pinkerton not only attended the course, but also strongly encouraged our idea of turning the material into a book. We also would like to thank Mat Marcus, who collaborated with Alex on a similar course at Adobe in 2004–2005.

The other members of the Fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms for Search team played important roles throughout the process. Anil Gangolli helped shape the content of the course, Ryan Ernst provided much of the programming infrastructure, and Paramjit Oberoi gave invaluable feedback during the writing stage. We have enjoyed working with all of them and are grateful for their input.

We are grateful to our editors, Peter Gordon and Greg Doench, and to the team of experts assembled by Addison-Wesley, including managing editor John Fuller, production editor Mary Kesel Wilson, copyeditor Jill Hobbs, and compositor/LaTeX expert Lori Hughes for all their work in turning our rough manuscript into a polished book.

Finally, we’d like to thank the many friends, family members, and colleagues who read earlier drafts of the book and/or gave us comments, corrections, suggestions, advice, or other help: Gašper Ažman, John Banning, Cynthia Dwork, Hernan Epelman, Ryan Ernst, Anil Gangolli, Susan Gruber, Jon Kalb, Robert Lehr, Dmitry Leshchiner, Tom London, Mark Manasse, Paul McJones, Nicolas Nicolov, Gor Nishanov, Paramjit Oberoi, Sean Parent, Fernando Pelliccioni, John Reiser, Robert Rose, Stefan Vargyas, and Adam Young. The book is much better as a result of their contributions.

Several careful readers sent corrections to errors that occurred in the first and second printings of this book, or in the digital editions. Thanks to the following people for reporting these errors: Abutalib Aghayev, Vladimir Burenkov, Greg Ives, Nitin Kumar, John Lakos, Andy Lawman, Jeremy Murphy, Anil Pal, Miguel Pinkas, Daniel Roldán, Alexander Slinkin, Saul Tamari, and Boris Vassilev. Additional errors may be reported at [email protected], and future corrections may be found at www.fm2gp.com/errata.html.