First, we want to thank those who inspired us to write this book. These include pioneers in the area of software design and refactoring, including Grady Booch, David Parnas, Martin Fowler, Bob Martin, Stéphane Ducasse, Erich Gamma, Ward Cunningham, and Kent Beck. Reading their books, articles, and blogs helped us better understand the concepts of software design.

Next, we want to thank all those who helped us write this book. In this context, we want to deeply appreciate the people who shared their experiences and war stories that made their way into the book. These include the attendees of our training sessions, participants of the online Smells Forum that we had set up, and the numerous people that we talked to at various conferences and events.

We would also like to thank the technical reviewers of this book: Grady Booch, Stéphane Ducasse, and Michael Feathers. Their critical analyses and careful reviews played a key role in improving the quality of this book. We are also thankful to Venkat Subramaniam for providing valuable review comments and suggestions. In addition, we would like to thank our friends Vishal Biyani, Nandini Rajagopalan, and Sricharan Pamudurthi for sparing their time and providing thoughtful feedback.

We are deeply indebted to Grady Booch and Stéphane Duccase for believing in our work and writing the forewords for our book.

This book would not have been possible without the overwhelming help and support we received from the whole team at Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier. A special thanks to Todd Green who believed in our idea and provided excellent support from the time of inception of the project to its realization as a book that you hold in your hands. We also would like to convey our sincere thanks to Lindsay Lawrence for supporting us throughout the book publishing process. Further, we thank Punithavathy Govindaradjane and her team for their help during the production process Finally, our thanks to Mark Rogers for his invaluable contribution as the designer.

Finally, we want to express our gratitude toward those who supported us during the writing process. Our special thanks to K Ravikanth and PVR Murthy for their insightful discussions which helped improve the book. Girish and Tushar would like to thank Leny Thangiah, Rohit Karanth, Mukul Saxena, and Ramesh Vishwanathan (from Siemens Research and Technology Center, India) and Raghu Nambiar and Gerd Hoefner (from Siemens Technologies and Services Pvt. Ltd., India) for their constant support and encouragement. Ganesh would like to thank Ajith Narayan and Hari Krishnan (from ZineMind Technologies Pvt. Ltd., India) for their support.

We spent countless weekends and holidays working on the book instead of playing with our kids or going out for shopping. We thank our families for their constant love, patience, and support despite the myriad long conferencing sessions that we had during the course of this book project.