Acknowledgments

I’d like to express my deepest respect and gratitude to the Kotlin team, the developers at JetBrains who are working tirelessly on different parts of the language and related tools. I always knew they were very smart, but a short visit with them showed me also how receptive, keen, and meticulous they are in learning about the usage of the language out in the wild, so they can improve the language. Thank you, team, keep up your hard work; what you do is sincerely appreciated.

Several developers who reviewed this book showed me so many ways in which I should improve. They taught me about the edge cases that I had missed, shared their experiences, and gave me useful pointers. This book is better because of the excellent review by Tom Adam, Ashish Bhatia, Andrey Breslav, Daniel DeGroff, Zulfikar Dharmawan, Roman Elizarov, Hadi Hariri, Steven Hicks, Rod Hilton, Ragunath Jawahar, Manuel Jordan, Dave Klein, Josh Long, Ted Neward, Eugene Petrenko, Owen Rumney, Nate Schutta, Brian Vermeer, Brian Sletten, Craig Walls, and Tory Zundel. In particular I would like to make special mention of the extensive and thorough reviews by Tom Adam and Eugene Petrenko—I am so glad I invited you to review this book, and I am thankful that you both accepted.

One of the nice benefits of bringing a book out in beta releases, making the contents available for readers while it’s still being written, is the feedback from the early readers through the book’s errata webpage. I would like to thank Cassian Braconnier, Pere Casafont, Freek de Bruijn, Nicholas Erasmus, Bill Judd, Daniel Kay, Jacques Ledoux, Michiel Leegwater, Adekunle Lukman, Ioannis Mavroukakis, Kin Pi, Paolo Pilloni, N. Raghavendra, Mark Rotteveel, Felipe Sultani, and Jeroen Wenting. The feedback you provided helped me to improve this book through each beta release.

Every page in this book benefited from extensive, multiple, and highly patient reviews of my editor Jackie Carter. She has set a very high standard for what to expect from an editor. Thank you, Jackie, for all that you do, both on the reviews and in terms of the moral support and encouragements you provided, especially when things were not going smoothly. I have so much to learn from you.

I’d like to thank the good folks at the Pragmatic Bookshelf, Andy Hunt, Brian MacDonald, Janet Furlow, and many others who worked behind the scenes to make this book a reality. The fast responses and assistance from each one of you made this such a pleasurable journey. Thank you for accepting this book for publication.

None of this would have been possible without the support, encouragement, and patience of my family. I am thankful to my wife Kavitha and my sons Karthik and Krupa. Now that I am done with this book, I should have more time for dad jokes.