I am grateful for the casual and noncompetitive home and school environment during the early years of my life, thanks to my parents Sabita and Prafulla and also my teachers at Loyola High School in the city of Poona (Pune), India.

I am also grateful for the influence of and encouragement from several supervisors, coworker, and friends over the years: Suresh Joshi at the Software Engineering and Design Company, India, and Manny Bhangui at Citibank, India, had great technical insight and style, which inspired me during the early years of my professional work experience in the 1990s. Maureen A. McGee and Bobbie Pitzner both at AT&T in Short Hills, NJ, were highly encouraging when I was a newly arrived immigrant in the United States. Jeff Lutz at Boldtech Systems in Colorado was highly supportive professionally and personally during the brief period of our working together and beyond. Jon Ford at Sandcherry/nVoc and Linda Gonzalez at the Starz Entertainment Group were both in their own ways, highly insightful and encouraging, during my time at these respective companies. I would also like to thank Richard Steel, Uday Natra, Martin Wills, Li Wang, Chris Butler and Rob Nevitt for their collaboration and friendship.

I am especially grateful to Nathan Blair, for his meticulous and valuable feedback in reviewing this book. Nathan wrote his first program in BASIC on a TRS-80 under the guidance of his grandmother and quickly discovered that programming and computers were his passion. Since then, he has worked on a wide variety of platforms and languages. Nathan has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and currently lives in the Denver area in Colorado.

I would like to thank Rudi Cilibrasi for the inspiration and insight that I gained from our long conversations during the year 2012. I would also like to thank Rudi very much for his valuable suggestions and the public recommendation for this book. Rudi Cilibrasi is a computer scientist who explores math, machine learning, and networking through programming and amiable interactions with friends. Rudi develops phylogenetic tree reconstruction algorithms based on mitochondrial DNA and machine translation algorithms for natural human languages based on the World Wide Web.

I would also like to thank Franz Zemen for his valuable feedback on the initial section of this book.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank my editor Brett Kurzman and the rest of Wiley team for their valuable trust and effort in making my first book possible.