Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we want to thank the technical reviewers, who took the time from their busy schedules to review the book and provide valuable comments to make this book better: Mark Brown, Claudia Salzberg, Mel Gorman, Arnold Robbins, Radhakrishnan Sethuraman, Joe Brazeal, and Alessio Gaspar.

We would like to thank our employer, IBM, and our managers, Karen Slapik and Tayna Fulmer, for supporting us in writing this book. Without their support, we may have still been writing this book.

We would like to give attribution to Wolfgang Gellerich of IBM in Germany for his contribution on porting issues specific to the IBM zSeries mainframe (appendix F, "Porting Issues Specific to the IBM zSeries Mainframe").

Several folks at IBM also need special mention. They provided us with easy access to lots of technical and nontechnical advice that was helpful in providing us the needed assistance at the right time: Rich Ferri, Craig Cook, Craig Fellenstein, Chris Almond, Gary Hook, Glen Chalemin, Bradford Cobb, Tom Grogan, Hans Dresen, Brian Vicknair, Vandana Kumar, and Calvin Sze.

We would like to thank Mark L. Taub of Prentice Hall for trusting us in our decisions regarding the book content and flow. We want to recognize the guidance that Jennifer Blackwell gave us on how to write a good technical book. Special thanks are also due to Christy Hackerd and the entire copyediting staff at Prentice Hall, who provided us with excellent support and endless patience during the production of this book.

Artis would like to thank Luther and Queen Walker for their guidance and parenting, which taught Artis how to just "do it" when it comes to making decisions.