Most of the time, writing a book is a lonely occupation that involves only the author, a laptop computer, and quite a lot of software. Fortunately, at the beginning and end of the process, the author gets to work with other human beings to get the job started and completed.
The process starts with the acquisitions editor. In my case, I have been lucky enough to convince Greg Doench not just once, but twice, that he really needs to publish my work. Core Java Foundation Classes took a year to complete, which was long enough, but Core Swing: Advanced Programming was in development for eighteen months well over twice the time that I had originally expected to spend on it. My thanks go to Greg not only for giving me a second opportunity to write about Swing, but also for being so patient as the expected completion dates came and went; and to Greg's assistant, Mary Treacy, for organizing such mundane but important things as a contract and royalty checks.
I am grateful to the technical reviewers for this book, Cameron Laird and Robert Evans, for carefully reading the manuscript in draft form and spotting some (and hopefully most) of the many mistakes that are inevitable in a book of this size covering a topic that has changed quite a lot over the period of the book's development. My thanks in advance to those readers who spot the remaining errors, and to those who have already alerted me to the minor mistakes in my first book, Core Java Foundation Classes, that were not caught before its publication!
When the writing and review process are finally complete, the book is in the hands of the Prentice Hall production team. Anne Trowbridge and Sean Donahue did a great job respectively managing the production process and laying out some of the chapters in readiness for printing. Thanks also to the copy editor, Bernadette Murphy Bentley, and proofreader, Stephanie English, for correcting my grammar and my non-American spelling. Most of all, though, I am extremely grateful to my production editor, Vanessa Moore, not only for making the sure the book's Word files were accurately converted to the finished product that you now hold in your hands, but also for ensuring that everyone involved, including me, delivered what they were supposed to on the dates that they had promised. And, although I really shouldn't mention it here, thanks also to Vanessa for taking the time while she was on vacation there to collect information about Barcelona so that my family would be able to make the best of our visit there this Spring.
Two companies, NetBeans and SwingSoft, were generous enough to allow me to include their software on this book's CD-ROM. I'd particularly like to express my thanks to John Bridges and Eddie Chan of SwingSoft who not only agreed to allow me to use their software, but also took the time to build an evaluation version especially for this book.
Finally, my thanks once again to my family, Berys, Andrew, and Katie, who put up one more time with my continued absence and the always untidy state of my working environment. I promise not to do this again for a while at least not for the rest of this century!
Kim Topley
November, 1999
