ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the following people, who helped make this book possible.

First Edition

First, the people who inspired me:

Jenny Watson, acquisitions editor at Wiley Publishing who originally suggested that I write a shell scripting book.

John C. Dvorak, noted columnist and pundit. In an episode of his video podcast, Cranky Geeks, Mr. Dvorak described the process of writing: “Hell. Write 200 words a day, and in a year, you have a novel.” This advice led me to write a page a day until I had a book.

Dmitri Popov wrote an article in Free Software Magazine titled “Creating a book template with Writer,” which inspired me to use OpenOffice.org Writer (and later, LibreOffice Writer) for composing the text. As it turned out, it worked wonderfully.

Next, the volunteers who helped me produce the original, freely distributed version of this book (available at LinuxCommand.org):

Mark Polesky performed an extraordinary review and test of the text.

Jesse Becker, Tomasz Chrzczonowicz, Michael Levin, and Spence Miner also tested and reviewed portions of the text.

Karen M. Shotts contributed a lot of hours editing my original manuscript.

Finally, the good folks at No Starch Press who worked long and hard making the commercial version of my book:

Serena Yang, production manager; Keith Fancher, my editor; and the rest of the No Starch Press staff.

Second Edition

Special thanks go out to the following volunteers who provided valuable feedback incorporated into the freely distributed versions and the No Starch Press second edition: Adrian Arpidez, Hu Bo, Steve Bragg, John Burns, Paolo Casati, Heriberto Cantú, Enzo Cardinal, Lixin Duan, Joshua Escamilla, Bruce Fowler, Devin Harper, Jørgen Heitmann, Jonathan Jones, Sunil Joshi, Ma Jun, Eric Kammerer, Seth King, Chris Knight, Jaroslaw Kolosowski, Jim Kovacs, Bartłomiej Majka, Bashar Maree, Frank McTipps, Mike O’Donnell, Justin Page, Parviz Rasoulipour, Waldo Ribeiro, Nick Rose, Satej Kumar Sahu, Mikhail Sizov, Ben Slater, Pickles Spill, Gabriel Stutzman, Francesco Turco, Wolfram Volpi, Boyang Wang, Valter Wierzba, and Christian Wuethrich.

Contributing to the second edition from No Starch Press were Serena Yang, production manager, and Meg Sneeringer, production editor; Chris Cleveland, editor; Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, technical reviewer; and Kim Wimpsett, copy editor.

Lastly, many thanks to the readers of LinuxCommand.org, who have sent me so many kind emails. Their encouragement gave me the idea that I was really on to something!