Acknowledgments

Writing this book was a rather nightmarish experience. Not only is Skype moving faster than a speeding bullet, but it is also clearly a technology that needed to be written about, and written about in a timely fashion. This put quite a lot of pressure on me to write the book, but rather more on my family. To my son Nathaniel, who lost a whole summer with his dad because of the book, and to my wife Susan, who put up with being growled at from my computer keyboard in a hotel room in Hawaii while on vacation, all I can say is thanks, and that I hope to make it up to both of you.

Mike Loukides, my editor, was the inspiration for this book. When Mike suggested I write a book on Skype hacks, I didn't know what a great undertaking the book would be, or how much I would learn from the experience. Nor, frankly, how much fun Skype as a technology would be. Mike was also (together with Lawrence Hudson, mentioned earlier) a constant pillar of support and encouragement, and was someone to bounce ideas off of during my early days before sitting down to write the book, when I was completely replacing my home phone system and otherwise hacking around with Skype.

Kelly Larabee at Skype was a joy to work with. She was very professional, and she cut through a lot of red tape to get the book reviewed by the Skype development team. Many thanks go to her, to Kat James, and to the team at Skype.

The Skype community who are active on the Skype user forums are a wonderful resource for anyone using Skypeand for authors of books on Skype, they are doubly so! Too numerous to mention by name, my thanks go out to all the regular, and irregular, posters to the Skype forums. Special mention goes to Bill Campbell and the Skype Journal (http://www.skypejournal.com/), for his encouragement during the writing of this book and for his insights into the world of Skype.

I've been enamored with O'Reilly as a publisher since the days of its X-Windows book series, and I've been a constant reader of all things O'Reilly since then. So, when the opportunity to actually write for O'Reilly came about, I felt both flattered and privileged by the opportunity. The crew at O'Reilly didn't disappoint. In terms of both the caliber of the staff and their professionalism, O'Reilly made Skype Hacks a reality in record time.

Lastly, in the final analysis, all authors must shoulder the responsibility for their work. So, any errors or omissions that remain in this book are not from want of effort to remove them, but are the result of the fallibility of the author. However, I do make the commitment that I will share any such errors or omissions that are brought to my attention with all readers of this book, through its web site, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/SkypeHacks/index.html. This is also the place to check for errata and updates to code listings.