Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the help of many people during the making of this book.

First, I must thank my editor, John Neidhart (Iron Chef Garage), for being a standup guy through the many labyrinthine conversations that helped shape this new series. I appreciate your high-availability, ease of maintenance, and extensibility. Here's to more sushi at Bond Street.

I am grateful not only to John, but to the many good and hard-working people at Prentice Hall for the opportunity to work on this series. Thank you to production editor Michael Thurston, and Kelli Brooks who worked very hard to root out the errors in this book and bring it all together. Special thanks to Anthony Gemmellaro and the entire production team for the stunningly cool artwork and interior. I am also grateful to the good people of the Salt River Prima-Maricopa Indian Community; may you live long and prosper.

The efforts of my technical reviewers were tremendous. Thank you to Pawel Zurek, a terrific software developer with an eagle eye. I appreciate very much the careful and insightful comments of J. Benton: it's really fun to talk with you about searching, and planning, and algorithms (all important things in life). Thank you also to Vic Miller for your terrific work in technically reviewing this book. You caught a number of errors; thanks for helping me develop with pleasure.

I am a lucky sonofagun to be married to Alison Brown, my favorite thing in this world. She has also been very helpful in shaping this series. Thank you, Alison, for your smashing ideas, perseverance, and hard work—and for helping keep me monotonously on-message.

Eben Hewitt
July 2004
Scottsdale, Arizona