Acknowledgments

Have you ever been surprised, or even bemused, by the seemingly endless list of names that scrolls up the screen during the ending credits of a motion picture? Do you ever wonder if it really takes that many people to make a movie?

Similarly, the number of people involved in the writing of book would probably be a big surprise to most people. It takes a large collaborative effort on the part of many contributors with a variety of talents to bring the volume you are holding (or ebook that you are reading onscreen) to fruition.

The staff at Manning worked tirelessly with us to make sure that this book attained the level of quality that we hoped for, and we thank them for their efforts. Without them, this book would not have been possible. The “end credits” for this book include not only our publisher, Marjan Bace, and editor Mike Stephens, but also the following contributors: Douglas Pudnick, Andrea Kaucher, Karen Tegtmayer, Katie Tenant, Megan Yockey, Dottie Marsico, Mary Piergies, Tiffany Taylor, Denis Dalinnik, Gabriel Dobrescu, and Ron Tomich.

Enough cannot be said to thank our peer reviewers who helped mold the final form of the book, from catching simple typos to correcting errors in terminology and code and even helping to organize the chapters within the book. Each pass through a review cycle ended up vastly improving the final product. For taking the time to help review the book, we’d like to thank Jonathan Bloomer, Valentin Crettaz, Denis Kurilenko, Rama Krishna Vavilala, Philip Hallstrom, Jay Blanchard, Jeff Cunningham, Eric Pascarello, Josh Heyer, Gregg Bolinger, Andrew Siemer, John Tyler, and Ted Goddard.

Very special thanks go to Valentin Crettaz who served as the book’s technical editor. In addition to checking each and every sample of example code in multiple environments, he also offered invaluable contributions to the technical accuracy of the text.

Bear Bibeault

For this, my third published tome, the cast of characters I’d like to thank has a long list of “usual suspects,” including, once again, the membership and staff at javaranch.com. Without my involvement in JavaRanch, I’d never have gotten the opportunity to start writing in the first place, and so I sincerely thank Paul Wheaton and Kathy Sierra for starting the whole thing, as well as fellow staffers who gave me encouragement and support, including (but probably not limited to) Eric Pascarello, Ben Souther, Ernest Friedman Hill, Mark Herschberg, and Max Habbibi.

Thanks go out to Valentin Crettaz—not only for serving as technical editor but also for introducing me to jQuery in the first place—and to my coworker Daniel Hedrick who volunteered the PHP examples for the latter part of the book.

My partner Jay, and dogs, Little Bear (well, we couldn’t have named him just Bear, now could we?) and Cozmo, get the usual warm thanks for putting up with the shadowy presence who shared their home but who rarely looked up from the MacBook Pro keyboard for all the months it took to write this book.

And finally I’d like to thank my coauthor, Yehuda Katz, without whom this project would not have been possible.

Yehuda Katz

To start, I’d like to thank Bear Bibeault, my coauthor, for the benefit of his extensive writing experience. His talented writing and impressive abilities to navigate the hurdles of professional publishing were a tremendous part of what made this book possible.

While speaking of making things possible, it’s necessary that I thank my lovely wife Leah, who put up with the long nights and working weekends for far longer than I would have felt comfortable asking. Her dedication to completing this book rivaled even my own; and, as in all things, she made the most difficult part of this project bearable. I love you, Leah.

Obviously, there would be no jQuery in Action without the jQuery library itself. I’d like to thank John Resig, the creator of jQuery, for changing the face of client-side development and easing the burden of web developers across the globe (believe it or not, we have sizable user groups in China, Japan, France, and many other countries). I also count him as a friend who, as a talented author himself, helped me to prepare for this tremendous undertaking.

There would be no jQuery without the incredible community of users and core team members, including Brandon Aaron and Jörn Zaefferer on the development team; Rey Bango and Karl Swedberg on the evangelism team; Paul Bakaus, who heads up jQuery UI; and Klaus Hartl and Mike Alsup, who work on the plugins team with me. This great group of programmers helped propel the jQuery framework from a tight, simple base of core operations to a world-class JavaScript library, complete with user-contributed (and modular) support for virtually any need you could have. I’m probably missing a great number of jQuery contributors; there are a lot of you guys. Suffice it to say that I would not be here without the unique community that has come up around this library, and I can’t thank you enough.

Lastly, I want to thank my family whom I don’t see nearly enough since my recent move across the country. Growing up, my siblings and I shared a tight sense of camaraderie, and the faith my family members have in me has always made me imagine I can do just about anything. Mommy, Nikki, Abie, and Yaakov: thank you, and I love you.