About the Authors

Owen L. Astrachan is professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University and the department's director of undergraduate studies for teaching and learning. He has taught programming in a variety of environments for more than 20 years, each year searching for a simpler, more agile approach in helping students understand computer science and the craft of programming. Professor Astrachan is an NSF CAREER award winner, has published several papers cowritten with undergraduates on using patterns in an academic setting, and is the author of the textbook A Computer Science Tapestry: Exploring Programming and Computer Science with C++, published by McGraw-Hill. He won the Distinguished Teaching in Science award at Duke in 1995, and the Outstanding Instructor of Computer Science award while on sabbatical in 1998 at the University of British Columbia. Owen can be reached at [e-mail].

Robert C. Duvall is not an actor, but a lecturer in computer science at Duke University. Before moving to Durham, North Carolina, he did his undergraduate and graduate work at Brown University, where he helped move the curriculum from a procedures-first approach using Pascal to an objects-first approach using Java. He has also taught with Lynn Stein's Rethinking CS101 project at MIT. Primarily, he enjoys using graphics, object-oriented frameworks, and patterns to make current research understandable and usable by novice programmers. Robert can be reached at [e-mail].

Eugene Wallingford is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Northern Iowa. He has been writing object-oriented programming for more than ten years, in CLOS, Smalltalk, C++, Java, and Ruby. He spent many years doing research in artificial intelligence, where he built applications that used domain knowledge to solve problems in legal reasoning, product design and diagnosis, and ecological systems. Eugene still does some work in AI but spends more of his time studying the structures of programs and helping students learn how to write programs. His work with programming and design patterns developed in tandem with a view on how programs grow in the face of changing requirements, which in turn found a compatible philosophy in Extreme Programming. Eugene can be reached at [e-mail].