Acknowledgments

It wasn’t until I wrote this book that I really understood why every author’s acknowledgments say, “This book would not be possible without . . .” If it were not for these people that helped me throughout the writing process, I would have given up and there would be no book.

I must start by thanking Louise Corrigan, my wonderful editor, for absolutely everything. I originally just casually asked her who I should talk to about writing a book, then just a few months later I had signed my contract. Throughout the process she has encouraged me (there were many times when I wanted to just stop writing) and helped develop the ideas for each chapter. Without Louise, I am certain that this book would be just a figment of my imagination, but instead you are holding it in your hands. Thank you Louise, for believing in me.

Before starting the book, I had no idea what the role of coordinating editor meant. Mark Powers and Christine Ricketts were my two coordinating editors, and they are both incredible people. It took me far longer to write the book than I had expected and yet both Mark and Christine did a great job making sure everything went as smoothly as possible.

The final member of staff from Apress that I owe a great many thanks to is Linda Seifert, who copyedited the entire book. I may have written a book now but I am still a programmer, so Linda was like a magician turning my strings of words into sentences worthy of being published.

I know there were also many other people working behind the scenes on the book, whom I had little contact with. So I would like to say thank you to those people too.

My technical reviewer throughout the book was Keith Cirkel and I truly could not have been luckier. Keith is a great guy and an incredible programmer. He constantly gave me ideas on how to improve not only the code but the flow of the chapters as well. Much of the code was written late at night and he was able to pick up lots of ways to improve the code, rather than just testing that it ran without errors.

Alongside the people working with me on the book, I have some other people that deserve acknowledgement for their varied support with the book. First is Ryan Lamvohee, a programmer from Australia. I’ve never met Ryan in person, but he was the first programmer I ever got to know online and has supported me ever since. It was Ryan’s interest in programming computers to make music that I learned much of what I wrote in Chapter 5 about music theory in JavaScript. Ryan also helped a great deal with the beginning of the book, developing ideas for the example projects.

I of course need to thank Jeremy Keith for writing the foreword of this book. I really wanted Jeremy to write it, but I didn’t expect him to do so! He is an incredible writer, deeply thoughtful, and a true asset to the web. When I asked him for a title to put along side his name, I expected it to be to do with Clearleft (where he was one of the founders). Instead he asked for “Ambassador to the Web.” If it were any one else, I would be wary of that title—but Jeremy really does deserve it.

Stuart Memo was another inspiration for Chapter 5, having given a brilliant talk titled “JavaScript is the new Punk Rock” that I highly recommend you watch. Stuart has also done a great many other interesting things with the Web Audio API so take a look at his website: www.stuartmemo.com. Originally, I was going to write my own 3D music visualization but no matter what I did, I could not (at least in the time I had) do better than the one Steven Wittens had already explained in a lot of detail. So I was very thankful when Steven gave me his permission to use his visualization in the book. I highly recommend you read his article explaining the math behind the visualization, as well as the other articles on Steven’s incredible website: www.acko.net.

Both Matt Diamond and Keith Norman were also very helpful to the development of the book. Matt wrote the Recorder.js script that allows recording of the Web Audio API nodes and he helped with some problems I had using it. Keith Norman wrote the base code for the Web RTC code that I used in Chapter 8 and helped to review my code.

Throughout the book I had a lot of support from my family and friends, especially of course my parents (who I dedicated to book to). Everybody was thrilled for me and tried to help keep me enthused. I would like to give special thanks to everybody in the University of Kent’s School of Computing and Plymouth Marine Laboratory’s Remote Sensing Department for their consistent support. I would also like to thank my housemates, Edd Greer and Silvana Mallor Hoya, who both put up with me working all hours of the day and helped me see the book to its end. There are so many other people that I wish I could give acknowledgement to but my final thank you goes to Sam Hutchings, a friend of mine that I consider to be a wordsmith. He helped with some of the phrasing and was another person who helped my enthusiasm without which I would not have finished writing this book. And lastly, thank you to everybody on Twitter that put up with all my moaning throughout the writing process!