About the Authors

BEAR BIBEAULT has been writing software for over three decades, starting with a Tic-Tac-Toe program written on a Control Data Cyber supercomputer via a 100-baud teletype. Because he has two degrees in Electrical Engineering, Bear should be designing antennas or something; but, since his first real job with Digital Equipment Corporation, he has always been much more fascinated with programming.

Bear has also served stints with companies such as Lightbridge Inc., BMC Software, Dragon Systems, and even served in the U. S. Military teaching infantry soldiers how to blow up tanks. (Care to guess which job was the most fun?) Bear is currently a Software Architect and Technical Manager for a company that builds and maintains a large financial web application used by the accountants that many of the Fortune 500 companies keep in their dungeons.

In addition to his day job, Bear also writes books (duh!), runs a small business that creates web applications and offers other media services (but not wedding videography, never wedding videography), and helps to moderate JavaRanch.com as a “sheriff.” When not planted in front of a computer, Bear likes to cook big food (which accounts for his jeans size), dabble in photography and video editing, ride his Yamaha V-Star, and wear tropical print shirts.

He works and resides in Austin, Texas, a city he dearly loves except for the completely insane drivers.

YEHUDA KATZ has been involved in a number of open-source projects over the past several years. In addition to being a core team member of the jQuery project, he is also a contributor to Merb, an alternative to Ruby on Rails (also written in Ruby).

Yehuda was born in Minnesota, grew up in New York, and now lives in sunny Santa Barbara, California. He has worked on websites for the New York Times, Allure Magazine, Architectural Digest, Yoga Journal, and other similarly high-profile clients. He has programmed professionally in a number of languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript.

In his copious spare time, he maintains VisualjQuery.com and helps answer questions from new jQuery users in the IRC channel and on the official jQuery mailing list.