Acknowledgments (First Edition)

A small application for drawing simple shapes is used in the book to illustrate various aspects of GUI building. The idea for this application, as far as we know, first appeared in Appendix D of Data Structures and Problem Solving Using Java (M.A. Weiss, Addison-Wesley, 1998).

At Addison-Wesley-Longman (AWL), we would like to thank Emma Mitchell for the support and the guidance she provided us right from the start of this project, Martin Klopstock at AWL for accommodating the non-standard procedure involved in getting the book to the printing press, Clive Birks at CRB Associates for providing the professional look to the contents of this book, and finally, Sally Mortimore at AWL for seeing us over the finishing line. The efforts of other professionals behind the scenes at AWL are also acknowledged.

Many reviewers have been involved during the course of writing this book. First of all, we would like to thank the five anonymous reviewers commissioned by AWL to review the initial draft. Their input was useful in the subsequent writing of this book.

Several people have provided us with feedback on different parts of the material at various stages: Jon Christian Lønningdal, Tord Kålsrud, Kjetil Iversen, Roy Oma, and Arne Løkketangen. Their help is hereby sincerely acknowledged.

We are also very grateful to Laurence Vanhelsuwé, Kris Laporte, Anita Jacob, and Torill Hamre for taking on the daunting task of reviewing the final draft, and providing us with extensive feedback at such short notice. We would like to thank Marit Mughal for reading the manuscript with the trained eye of a veteran English schoolteacher.

We now understand why family members are invariably mentioned in a preface. Without our families' love, support, and understanding this book would have remained a virtual commodity. Khalid would like to thank Marit, Nina, and Laila for their love, and for being his pillars of support, during the writing of this book. Thanks also to the folks in Birmingham for cheering us on. Rolf would like to thank Liv, Rolf V., Knut, and Elisabeth for enduring the strange working hours producing this book has entailed. A special thanks to Marit for providing us with scrumptious dinners for consumption at the midnight hour.