Acknowledgments

During the preparation of this book, I enjoyed conversations and correspondence with Austin King, Richard Kreckel, Ethan Merritt, Dawid Weiss, Bastian Märkisch, Daniel Sebald, Petr Mikulik, Chris Mague, Luis Moux-Dominguez, and Lee Phillips. Christoph Bersch, Zoltán Vörös, and Clark Gaylord read drafts of this book and provided many detailed suggestions; Mojca Miklavec answered several specific questions with meticulous care. Others who read the draft manuscript include Ryan Balfanz, Martin Beer, Andrew Bovill, Vitaly Bragilevsky, Anthony Cramp, Wolfgang Ecker-Lala, Wesley R. Elsberry, Nitin Gode, David Kerns, Pavol Kral, Mathew Peet, Ravishankar Rajagopalan, Karl-Friedrich Ratzsch, Jonathan Rioux, Mike Shepard, and Arthur Zubarev.

I would also like to acknowledge the tremendous impact that Wikipedia has had on the way I work. When I prepared the first edition, obtaining even basic information on topics such as color spaces, Bézier curves, and the Mandelbrot set was a real challenge—difficult, time consuming, and not always successful. For all its faults and deficiencies, Wikipedia has made it tremendously much easier to obtain at least an initial introduction (and often quite a bit more) to an incredibly wide range of topics. It is a stunning achievement.

Finally, I want to thank the people at Manning who made this book possible: publisher Marjan Bace and everyone on the editorial and production teams, including Mary Piergies, Marina Michaels, Kevin Sullivan, Tiffany Taylor, Dottie Marsico, and many others who worked behind the scenes.