Acknowledgments

Howard wants to thank all the authors for their hard work on this book, on top of already punishing schedules. He wants in particular to acknowledge Michael Kay for going above and beyond the call of duty with his editing work on Jim Tivy's chapter. He wants to thank all the Addison-Wesley staff, including Mary O'Brien, Brenda Mulligan, Alicia Carey, Patrick Cash-Peterson, and Amy Fleischer, for their unfailing and courteous help. He'd like to thank the reviewers for their always useful feedback, and in particular wants to acknowledge Mike Champion for his good humor, his encyclopedic knowledge of XML, and the exquisite sensitivity with which he's always able to point out better ways of doing things. Lastly, Howard wants to thank his loving wife, Peg, for her near-infinite patience and for almost single-handedly building their dream house in the woods while Howard worked on this project.

The authors as a group want to acknowledge their appreciation for the work of all the members of the W3C XML Query and XSLT working groups, who are responsible for the design of XQuery and XPath, and especially for the leadership of Paul Cotton and Sharon Adler , chairs of the two working groups.

Don Chamberlin would like to thank his family and his colleagues at IBM for their support of his work on XQuery.

Mary Fern ndez thanks her husband Adam Buchsbaum and daughters Elena and Shira for their good cheer and patience during more than three years of travel for XQuery and for making everything that matters in life possible.

Michael Rys would like to thank Howard for encouraging the authors to write this book and the members of the XQuery and XSLT working groups for their relentless work on getting XPath and XQuery defined. He would also like to thank the people at Microsoft with whom he works for their inspiration and influence, especially Istvan Cseri, Michael Brundage, Shankar Pal, Gideon Schaller, Oliver Seeliger, and Joe Xavier, as well as the people working on SQL and XML standardization, especially Fred Zemke, Jim Melton, Andrew Eisenberg, Krishna Kulkarni, and Berthold Reinwald. Last but not least, he would like to express his gratitude to the joys of his life: Ursula, Janine, and Nils.

Jim Tivy would like to thank his family for their support and understanding.

Jonathan Robie would like to thank his wife, Esther, whose support has made it possible for him to participate in the work on XQuery, and his daughters Marissa, Emily, and Bethany, who missed out on time with their father while he was writing his chapter. He is also grateful to the members of the XML Query working group, from whom he has learned much and with whom he's grown, both as a computer scientist and as a person. He dedicates his chapter to the late Nigel Hutchison, who had an unusual gift for finding and appreciating the good in people and helping them to develop it and put it to use.

Mary Fern ndez, J r me Sim on, and Philip Wadler, the co-authors of Chapters 4 and 5, thank their colleagues in the XML Query working group, especially the co-editors of the XQuery Formal Semantics. They'd like to acknowledge the particularly important contributions made by Denise Draper, Peter Fankhauser, and Kristoffer Rose. Kristoffer Rose also provided invaluable help in typesetting.