Writing a book requires me to spend many, many hours at home for months at a time, researching, composing and rewriting, alone at my desk, with only my dog Sadie to keep me company. (Sadie is a three-year-old border collie, who doesn’t understand why we don’t spend every day running around outside.) Publishing a book, however, is a team effort, so if you have a moment, I’d like to introduce you to my team.

Let’s start with Lydia Hearn. Lydia and I have worked on books together for a long time, and I have found her to be a truly remarkable person. She is a tenured professor at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, where she teaches English. For this book, Lydia was my copy editor, which means that it was her job to find and correct any writing mistakes I might have made. This is harder than you might imagine, because writers think so fast that their fingers can’t keep up with their thoughts, which means it is easy to make mistakes, many of which are subtle and hard to find. That is why I need Lydia, a tireless perfectionist (actually, a tired perfectionist) with boundless enthusiasm and enormous skill. Moreover, Lydia is the only person in the world that I will, voluntarily, let make changes to what I write.

Next comes Jeff Pepper, the lead editor for this book. Jeff and I started publishing books together a long, long time ago, and it is through his efforts that I have been able to create many of my most successful, high-quality books. Whenever I start a new project with Jeff, I know that he will be there with lots of advice, experience, and a good-natured approach that comes from dealing with authors and publishing people all day long, for many years. In addition, for this particular book, Jeff put in many hours—often late at night and under pressure — processing the files I would send him to ensure that everything was done just right.

The other editor on our team is Mark Powers, who served as managing editor for this book. This means that Mark handled a lot of details, including a schedule that seemed to have a life of its own. Mark has a background, not only in book publishing, but in writing graphic novels and comic books, which makes him uniquely qualified to work with the more esoteric parts of this book.

Then there is Dmitry Shkatov, a very special person whose job it was to help me look for technical mistakes. Dmitry teaches computer science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In fact, if it weren’t for Dmitry, this book would never have been written. Here is how it happened.

On July 20, 2015, Dmitry wrote me the following letter:

Dear Harley,

I was wondering whether it would be possible to somehow get access to the chapter on Emacs from the 2nd edition of your “Student Guide to Unix”, which was sadly left out of the 3rd edition.

It’s the best introduction to Emacs I have ever seen (and that’s how I came to love Emacs), and now that I’m teaching computer science to South African undergraduates, I’d like to be able to share it with my students.

Your assistance would be highly appreciated not only by me, but I am sure, by my students as well.

Not long afterwards, Jeff Pepper contacted me about writing a new book. I showed him Dmitry’s letter, and we agreed that it would be a good idea for me to write a book focusing only on Emacs. We asked Dmitry if he would be the technical editor for the book, and he said yes. This was a stroke of luck for me, because you would have to search long and hard to find someone as smart as Dmitry, who has as much experience with Emacs. Dmitry not only read everything I wrote, making important suggestions, he also took the time to discuss all manner of Emacs-related ideas, which helped me enormously.

Speaking of help, I thank Ron Lockwood-Childs and Stephanie Lockwood-Childs, highly accomplished engineers and programmers, who helped me with advice on how to set up a Linux system to run on a virtual machine, specifically for testing Emacs. In addition, I thank Jebi Koilpillai, for helping me understand and test the technical issues involved in installing Emacs under Mac OS X.

As a writer, I always hope for production people who share my desire to create the best possible book. As such, I wish to thank several hard-working, skillful employees of SPi Global, an international business service provider. These three people are Mercy Thomas (account manager), Dulcy Nirmala Chellappa (project manager), Parameswari Balasubramaniyan (page layout artist), and Samuel Devanand (production editor). Without the time-consuming, detailed work of people like Mercy, Dulcy, Parameswari, and Samuel, it would not be possible to produce high-quality books like this one. I am lucky to have had their help.

For the final acknowledgments, I call upon the wisdom of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal who once observed, if you are going to spend hours a day for months at a time writing an Emacs book, you had better make sure that you get a lot of high-quality exercise, or you are going to have a lot of trouble. (Actually, the way he put it was Mens sana in corpore sano , which means “A healthy mind in a healthy body”.)

With this in mind, I thank Sandrine Rocher-Krul, my cardioboxing teacher, for helping me to stay fit, alert, and healthy. I have taken a lot of classes in my life — as a child, as an undergraduate, in grad school, and in medical school — and without a doubt, Sandrine is the best teacher I have ever had. She has a rare confluence of motivation, skill, and creativity, which she demonstrates daily. For the same reason, I am grateful to the other students with whom I have been taking cardioboxing for so long. In particular, I thank Miguel Trujillo and Abe Solis for their continued encouragement and their help.