Acknowledgments

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From Dan

I would first like to thank all the staff at Que Publishing for giving Kristina and me this opportunity to create this book. To Carol Ackerman, you always make these projects a pleasure , and thank you for being so patient with my overloaded schedule. You are the best!

I would also like to thank the technical editors, David Waldron and Patrick Ramseier. Their keen eyes and technical knowledge helped to capture (I hope) all the little silly mistakes that can happen in such a book. Thank you.

Also, I need a special thanks to Lorna Gentry, Kris Simmons, and Tricia Liebig for their efforts trying to decipher my technical jargon into some form of readable English. Thank you.

Finally, thank you to my co-author , Kristina Manalo. Your help, expertise, and determination in putting this book together were amazing. The different continents and time zones did make things difficult, but we accomplished what we set out to do, and I know the readers will enjoy reading the book as much as we did writing it.

From Tina

Thank you to Carol Ackerman, our acquisitions editor, for working with us from Casablanca to Kettering, London to the Poconos, across four continents and who knows how many more time zones! From the first page of the proposal to the last page of the final draft, you pulled the team together to guide us through the project.

Thank you, Lorna, for working with our ever-changing outline and for your flexibility and patience in working with our chapters. Your thorough and uncompromising work, together with the editorial team, has made sure that the book is concise , complete, and technically accurate.

Thank you to Dan, my co-author, colleague, friend, and mentor. Without you, my writing would ramble aimlessly all over the map and back again, just to see how far it was. Your classroom extends far beyond whiteboards , slideshows, text books, and labs .

And thank you to Dermot, my loyal friend and companion throughout these past 14 most memorable years . As they say in Ireland, where you will soon create your own universe, "May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, may the rain fall softly upon your fields, and until we meet again, may the Lord hold you in the palm of his hand."

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