Acknowledgments

First, none of this would be possible without the support and encouragement of my awesome wife, Meena. If she hadn’t put her goals on hold to allow me to spend six months designing, writing, and rewriting everything you see here, writing this book would have been a distant dream.

Next, I’d like to thank my parents for always encouraging me to aimlessly wander and enjoy free time doing what I like—such as teaching complete strangers via the Internet in the late 1990s how to do cool things with programming. I wouldn’t be half the rugged indoorsman/scholar/warrior I am today without them both .

On the publishing side, writing the words you see here is the easy part. Getting the book into your hands is an amazingly complex process. The more I learn about all the moving pieces involved, the more impressed I am with all the individuals who work tirelessly behind the scenes to keep this amazing machinery running. To everyone at Pearson who made this possible, thank you! There are a few people I’d like to explicitly call out, though. First, I’d like to thank Mark Taber for continuing to give me opportunities to work together, Chris Zahn for patiently addressing my numerous questions and concerns, Krista Hansing for turning my version of English into something humanly understandable, and Loretta Yates for helping make the connections a long time ago that made all of this happen. The technical content of this book has been reviewed in great detail by my long-time friends and online collaborators Kyle Murray (a.k.a. Krilnon) and Trevor McCauley (a.k.a. senocular). I can’t thank them enough for their thorough (and, frequently, humorous!) feedback.