First and foremost, I'd like to thank Cameron Purdy and Alex Gleyzer for giving me the opportunity to work on Coherence. It has been quite a journey—I still remember the day when we got a .NET application to connect to the cluster for the first time. Guys, it has been a privilege working with you all these years to make a great product even better.

I've heard many times that a book is never a single person's creation. Only now, after I have written one myself, I truly understand what that means.

I cannot thank enough my co-authors, Mark Falco and Patrick Peralta, members of the Coherence engineering team, who contributed two great chapters to the book. Patrick's chapter covers pretty much everything you need to know in order to integrate Coherence with persistent data sources. As for Mark's chapter on using the Coherence C++ client, well, let's just say that I would've had a really hard time writing that one myself J.

The sample application for the book is the result of the hard work of my colleagues from Solutions for Human Capital: Ivan Cikić, Nenad Dobrilović, Marko Dumić, and Aleksandar Jević. They managed to deliver (once again) on a very tight schedule, and I am very proud of the final result. Thank you for all the help and for putting up with my last minute change requests—I know it wasn't easy at times, but you have done a wonderful job.

I can honestly say (and everyone who saw the first draft is my witness) that this book was significantly improved based on the feedback from many reviewers. The official reviewers for the book were Rob Harrop, Jimmy Nilsson, Patrick Peralta, Steve Samuelson, and Robert Varga, but Mark Falco, Cameron Purdy, Cristobal Soto, Phil Wheeler, and Andrew Wilson also provided invaluable feedback. Jimmy, it is mostly your "fault" that there is a sample application now demonstrating (among other things) how to build a clean, testable domain model that works well with Coherence.

Many members of Coherence engineering and Oracle's Architecture team were only an e-mail or phone call away when I had questions: Noah Arliss, Simon Bisson, Gene Gleyzer, Jason Howes, Rob Misek, Andy Nguyen, Brian Oliver, Jon Purdy, and Randy Stafford all helped at one point or another, whether they know it or not. Thank you for that, and thank you for building such a great product.

James Lumsden, Dilip Venkatesh, Rajashree Hamine, and Srimoyee Ghoshal from Packt Publishing provided necessary support when I needed it and helped me reach the finish line. James, I know the journey was much longer than either of us expected. Thank you for believing in me even when I didn't.

My partners at Solutions for Human Capital, Snejana Sevak, Aleksandar Jević, and Nebojša Peruničić, helped more than they realize by shielding me from the daily disturbances of running a business and allowing me to focus my energy on writing, and I thank them for that.

I would also like to thank all the clients and colleagues I worked with over the years. I learned something new from each one of you, and for that I am grateful.

Most importantly, I would like to thank my family. My wife Marija supported me from the moment I decided to work on this book, even though she knew that my already busy schedule would only get busier because of it. People who think astronauts' wives have it rough have never met the wife of a traveling geek who decides to write a book. Хвала, љубави.

To my children, Ana Maria and Novak, I am sorry I couldn't play with you as much as we all wanted, and promise to make it up to you. You are too young to understand why daddy was sleeping during the day and working at night, but that doesn't matter now. Daddy is back and loves you both very much!