Personal Comments and Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people for their help and assistance as I wrote this book.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my editor, Mike Loukides. This book slipped by more than a few deadlines, and his patience, wonderful advice, and upbeat attitude were absolutely vital to this book being finished. I also owe a huge debt to my management teams , both at the University of Illinois (particularly Mona Heath and Ed Krol) and at Sun Microsystems (Dr. Keng-Tai Ko and Miroslav Klivansky). Their support, patience, and understanding proved invaluable.

My friends were a constant source of support during this affair, both in providing technical advice and being understanding of the "No, I can't go out, I have to work on the book" phrase that suddenly took over my vocabulary for two years . I would like to especially thank Keith Wessel, Kris Wehner, Majdi Abbas, Deb Fligor, Jay Kreibich, Adrian Cockcroft, Richard McDougall, Elizabeth Purcell, Tayfun Kocaglu, Paul Strong, Phil Stracchino, Christof Harper, and Ken MacInnis (in no particular order). Dr. Sanjay Patel was kind enough to admit a student with none of the prerequisites into his computer architectures course at the University of Illinois; his encouragement is very much appreciated. Rose Platt, Nancy Weber, and Dr. Robert Cahn opened their home to me and, in doing so, provided me with a safe retreat to sit and write for long breaks. Kate Secor kept me sane as I wrote the last half of this book: she jokes that she was my "good writing totem" as whenever she was around, I got a lot more written than otherwise .

It's hard for me to overstate the contributions of my family to this book, particularly my parents, Drs. Diane and Antonino Musumeci. It's somehow very reassuring to look at the people who raised you and realize that they have both written books -- how hard can it be, right? ^[2] My brothers Domenico and Walter kept me grounded in the real world, my grandfather Walter reminded me that there was a time before computers existed, and the family dog Gizmo was a constant source of amusement (it's hard to keep focused when a 15- pound Border Terrier is tearing around the house as fast as he can, and sometimes you need to be not focused).

^[2] The answer is: very hard .

I would like to dedicate this book to my grandmother, Kathleen Mikolaitis.

Acknowledgments from Mike Loukides

First and foremost, I want to thank Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci for doing what I could never have done: write the second edition of this book. It's really his work. I'm proud of the first edition, but I have to confess that it is primarily a piece of journalism. I had access to a number of system experts (Doug Gilmore, Chris Ryland, Tan Bronson, and the rest of the Multiflow diaspora, among others), and reported their expertise. (Many people aren't aware that the book started as part of the Multiflow TRACE/UNIX documentation set, although Multiflow went out of business before it could be published.) Gian-Paolo is the real thing, where I'm just a journalist : he brings a depth of knowledge and experience to the book that I never had. As proud as I am of the first edition, the second edition is a much better book.