First and foremost I thank Marina Michaels, my development editor at Manning. Without her kindness, insistence, skill, and humor, this book would never have made it into print. She made countless improvements during all stages and taught me a lot about writing. Even more importantly, time and again she helped me quit procrastinating, at least for a while, and churn out a couple new chapters.

In that vein, I want to explicitly deny any thanks to the makers of Civilization and Stellaris, of Breaking Bad and The Expanse, to the authors of the many great sci-fi books I read in recent years, and to everyone on American late-night TV—delightful as it was to enjoy the fruits of your labor, I really should’ve spent most of that time laboring myself, instead.

Three more people at Manning stand out: Jeanne Boyarsky, who provided important technical feedback and who carried this book through the final editing process when I couldn't; Viseslav Radovic, who showed infinite patience while creating and tweaking the diagrams to my liking; and Jean-François Morin, who tirelessly scoured the book and demo code bases for any errors I made. There are a lot more people involved in turning almost a million letters scattered around a bunch of Asciidoc files into an actual book: Cheryl Weisman, Rachael Herbert, David Novak, Tiffany Taylor, Melody Dolab, Happenstance Type-O-Rama, Aleksandar Dragosavljevic´, Mary Piergies, and Marija Tudor. Finally, I wish to thank all the reviewers who took the time to read my book and offer their comments: Anto Aravinth, Boris Vasile, Christian Kreutzer-Beck, Conor Redmond, Gaurav Tuli, Giancarlo Massari, Guido Pio Mariotti, Ivan Milosavljevic´, James Wright, Jeremy Bryan, Kathleen Estrada, Maria Gemini, Mark Dechamps, Mikkel Arentoft, Rambabu Posa, Sebastian Czech, Shobha Iyer, Steve Dawsonn-Andoh, Tatiana Fesenko, Tomasz Borek, and Tony Sweets. Thanks to all of you!

I also thank all the people from the community and at Oracle who have participated in developing the module system. Not only would there be nothing to write about without their hard work, but it was also their high-quality documentation and great talks that made me so excited about the topic. I want to especially mention Mark Reinhold, Alex Buckley, and Alan Bateman for spearheading this effort, and also for answering the many questions I posted to the Project Jigsaw mailing list. Thank you!

Among the people who might not expect it, I want to thank Robert Krüger, who, unbeknown to him, sparked my interest in the module system with that fateful mail on April 8, 2015; Christian Glökler, for the dispute that triggered my first afternoon with Project Jigsaw; and Boris Terzic, for always encouraging me to take the next step (and for letting me play with each new Java version at work). Then there are all the great people who reached out to me over the last year and provided me with feedback about what I had written so far—the overwhelming positivity gave me a lot of energy. Thank you!

To all my friends: thank you for sticking around even though I had so little time, and thank you for encouraging me during the rough patches. To my family: I tried hard not to let the work on this book bleed into the precious time we have together—thank you for forgiving me for all the times I failed. Your continued patience, love, and support made this possible. I wouldn’t be who I am without you. I love you.