Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank Dheeraj—my pillar of strength, my best friend, and my husband. His constant guidance, encouragement, and love kept me going. He helped me to get started with this book and got me over the goal line.

My sincere gratitude goes to Marjan Bace, publisher at Manning, for giving me the opportunity to author this book. The Manning team has been wonderful—Michael Stephens ensured that it was worth it for Manning to have a book on this subject. Cynthia Kane, my development editor, is like sunshine. Not only did she help me with the organization of individual chapters and the overall book, but she pulled me through whenever the task of writing a book became overwhelming. It’s always a pleasure to work with her. Copyeditor Linda Recktenwald not only applied her magic to sentence and language constructions but also supplemented her editing with valuable suggestions on technical content.

Technical development editor Francesco Bianchi suggested multiple additions and modifications, improving the content of this book. Technical proofreader Jean-François Morin was outstanding in his review. He not only pointed out existing errors but also suggested multiple improvements to the organization of the contents. Proofreader Katie Tennant was extremely capable and talented. She reviewed the final manuscript with great precision.

The technical reviewers on this book did an awesome job of reviewing the contents and sharing their valuable feedback and comments: Andrea Barisone, Andrea Consentino, Anutosh Ghosh, David Blau, Marty Henderson, Mirsad Vojnikovic, Nicola Pedot, Sanjiv Kumar, Simona Russo, Travis Nelson, and Ursin Stauss. I would also like to thank Nicole Butterfield and Donna Clements, review editors, for managing the whole review process and meticulously funneling the feedback to make this book better.

Dennis Dalinnik did an outstanding job of converting the black-and-white hand-drawn illustrations into glorious images. It was amazing to scrutinize the page proofs. I also thank Dennis for adjusting the images in the final page proofs, which was a lot of work. Janet Vail and Mary Piergies were awesome in their expertise at turning all text, code, and images into publishable form. I am also grateful to Candace Gillhoolley for her efforts in promoting the book.

I thank the MEAP readers for buying the book while it was being developed and for their suggestions, corrections, and encouragement.

I would also like to thank my former colleagues Harry Mantheakis, Paul Rosenthal, and Selvan Rajan, whose names I use in coding examples throughout the book. I have always looked up to them.

I thank my daughters, Shreya and Pavni, who often advised me on the images that I created for the book. I thank my family for their unconditional support. The book would have been not been possible without their love and encouragement.