Acknowledgments

The deep gratification of writing this book traces back to the support of my family: Suman (Mom), Umesh (Dad), and Natasha (Sis). Their happiness and pride are always contagious.

Moral support throughout the months of writing came from my close college friends, the Awesomest Turntable DJs: Alex Katz, Anish Simhal, Jasdev Singh, John Gillen, Jonathon Blonchek, Kelvin Green, Shiv Sinha, and Vinay Dandekar.

Thank you, Barbara Blumenthal, my best friend and more, for tying the galaxies, nebulas, and whales with your pink ribbons. You’ve been my escape, the cure to my writer’s block.

I would like to acknowledge the tremendous feedback I’ve received from online communities: my posts on Reddit (r/artificial, r/machinelearning, r/Python, r/Tensor-Flow, and r/Programming) and Hacker News received fruitful attention. I thank those who posted on the official book forum and contributed to the GitHub repository. In addition, my thanks go to the amazing group of technical peer reviewers led by Aleksandar Dragosavljević: Nii Attoh-Okine, Thomas Ballinger, John Berryman, Gil Biraud, Mikaël Dautrey, Hamish Dickson, Miguel Eduardo, Peter Hampton, Michael Jensen, David Krief, Nat Luengnaruemitchai, Thomas Peklak, Mike Staufenberg, Ursin Stauss, Richard Tobias, William Wheeler, Brad Wiederholt, and Arthur Zubarev. Their contributions included catching technical mistakes, errors in terminology, and typos, and making topic suggestions. Each pass through the review process and each piece of feedback implemented through the forum topics shaped and molded the manuscript.

Special thanks go to Ken Fricklas, who served as the book’s senior technical editor; Jerry Gaines, the book’s technical development editor; and David Fombella Pombal, the book’s technical proofreader. They are the best technical editors I could have hoped for.

Finally, I want to thank the people at Manning Publications who made this book possible: publisher Marjan Bace and everyone on the editorial and production teams, including Janet Vail, Tiffany Taylor, Sharon Wilkey, Katie Tennant, Dennis Dalinnik, and many others who worked behind the scenes. Of all the interactions with the many individuals at Manning, I extend my greatest gratitude to Toni Arritola, the book’s development editor. Her persistent guidance and education throughout the process opened the book to a much wider audience.