Acknowledgments

Creating this guide involved a lot of teamwork. It is the first time I’ve written a technical book and I wouldn’t have made it without all the help and advice I received from Mark Powers, Matthew Moodie, and Manuel Jordan. Mark has been very supportive and shared with me his experience on book writing in order to help me and kept encouraging me when I was ready to give up on writing because I thought my work was not good enough.

Matthew and Manuel have been great collaborators; I loved our exchanges of technical ideas and I am very thankful because working with them has helped me grow professionally. Many thanks to Kimberly Burton for her help turning my technical literature into human readable literature.

Most of all I want to thank Steve Anglin for finding me and for trusting me to get this done.

Apress has published many of the books I read and used to improve myself professionally during my studies and even after that. It is a great honor for me to write a book and publish it with Apress. It is great to contribute to the education of the next generation of developers.

I am grateful to all my friends that had the patience to listen to me complain about sleep loss, having too much work to do, and writer’s block. Thank you all for being supportive and making sure I still had some fun while writing this book.

And I would also like to add a very special thank you to Levi9 Romania, the company that introduced me to Spring and its country manager Nicu Lazar that supported me to become a Spring Professional.