Acknowledgments

A whole new set of players contributed to The Rails™ 3 Way, however I still need to thank some of my original supporters first. I can’t say enough good things about Debra Williams Cauley, my editor at Addison-Wesley. She is an excellent coach and motivator and oh-so-caring of her authors. I love you, Deb! Also again I have to thank my long-term partner Desi McAdam and my kids Taylor and Liam for being super-supportive and understanding of my time constraints during the heaviest times of writing.

My team at Hashrocket has been an amazing source of encouragement and help during the preparation of The Rails™ 3 Way. My partners Marian and Mark made sure I had all the time and help needed, and were always ready with a hug or words of encouragment when the times got tough. Jon Larkowski and Tim “tpope” Pope spent hours with me at my apartment, sometimes every night of the week, to make sure that the book got finished. Eliza Brock and Tim Pope hacked a massive XSLT script that converted the original Word .doc manuscript files into LATEX, enabling us to put the book into proper source control and make much more rapid progress than would otherwise be possible. Eliza, you are a freaking genius and an inspiration!

My friend Xavier Noria, Rails committer and former textbook reviewer, once again impressed us with his careful technical review and laser-focused feedback. Xavi picked up on dozens of ommissions and errors that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. What a hero!

One of my oldest and closest friends, Durran Jordan, was a late and welcome addition to The Rails™ 3 Way team. He’s the author of Mongoid, http://mongoid.org—one of the premier frameworks for using Mongo with Ruby and an up-and-coming personality in the NoSQL space. He’s currently working on a NoSQL in Ruby title for this series and provided some of the new content in this book concerning Active Model and background processing.

Chicago-based Rocketeers Josh Graham and Bernerd Schaefer also provided late-stage help, contributing material related to XML processing and Ajax. Other folks at Hashrocket that deserve acknowledgment include our director of operations and my longtime friend Sal Cardello, who controls resourcing and allowed me to take people away from billing to help me with the book. I also need to thank everyone else at Hashrocket who played supporting roles, including but not limited to, Rogelio Samour, Thais Camilo, Adam Lowe, “Big Tiger” Jim Remsik, Lar Van Der Jagt, Matt Yoho, Stephen Caudill, Robert Pitts, Sandro Turriate, Shay Arnette, and Veezus Kreist.

Thanks to David Black, James Adam, Trotter Cashion, Matt Pelletier, Matt Bauer, Jodi Showers, Pat Maddox, David Chelimski, Charles Brian Quinn, Patrik Naik, Diego Scataglini, and everyone else who contributed to making The Rails Way such a success.