Acknowledgments (Second Edition)

Feedback from many readers helped us to improve the first edition. We would like to thank the following readers for their input in this effort:

Michael F. Adolf, Tony Alicea, Kåre Auglænd, Jorge L. Barroso, Andre Beland, Darren Bruning, Paul Campbell, Roger Chang, Joanna Chappel, Laurian M Chirica, Arkadi Choufrine, Barry Colston, John Cotter, Frédéric Demers, Arthur De Souza, djc, William Ekiel, Darryl Failla, John Finlay, Christopher R. Gardner, Marco Garcia, Peter Gieser, George, Paul Graf, Shyamsundar Gururaj, Ray Ho, Leonardo Holanda, Zhu Hongjun, Kara Van Horn, Peter Horst, Nain Hwu, Kent Johnson, Samir Kanparia, Oleksiy Karpenko, Jeffrey Kenyon, Young Jin Kim, Kenneth Kisser, Billy Kutulas, Yi-Ming Lai, Robert M. Languedoc, Steve Lasley, Winser Lo, Naga Madipalli, Craig Main, Avinash Mandsaurwale, Thomas Mathai, S. Mehra, Yuan Meng, Simon Miller, William Moore, Anders Morch, George A. Murakami, Sandy Nemecek, Chun Pan, Abigail García Patiño, Anil Philip, Alfred Raouf, Peter Rorden, Christian Seifert, Gurpreet Singh, Christopher Stanwood, Swaminathan Subramanian, Siva Sundaram, Manju Swamy, John Sweeney, Harmon Taylor, Andrew Tolopko, Ravi Verma, Per J. Walstrøm, Chun Wang, James Ward, Winky, Chun Wang, Jimmy Yang, Jennie Yip, Yanqu Zhou, and Yingting Zhou.

At the UK office of Addison-Wesley/Pearson Education, we would like to thank our former editor Simon Plumtree for his unceasing support and patience while we slogged on with the second edition. We would also like to acknowledge the help and support of the following professionals, past and present, at the London office: Alison Birtwell, Sally Carter, Karen Sellwood and Katherin Ekstrom. A special thanks to Karen Mosman (who has since moved on to another job) for her encouragement and advice.

During the last lap of getting the book to the printing press, we were in the capable hands of Ann Sellers at the US office of Addison-Wesley/Pearson Education. We would like to acknowledge her efforts and that of other professionals?in particular, Greg Doench, Jacquelyn Doucette, Amy Fleischer, Michael Mullen, and Dianne Russell?who helped to get this book through the door and on to the bookshelf. Thanks also to Mike Hendrickson for always lending an ear when we met at the OOPSLA conferences, and pointing us in the right direction with our book plans.

We would like to thank the folks at Whizlabs Software for their collaboration in producing the contents for the CD accompanying this book. Those guys certainly know the business of developing exam simulators for certification in Java technology.

We were fortunate in having two Java gurus?Laurence Vanhelsuwé and Marcus Green?to do the technical review of the second edition. As he did for the first edition, Laurence came through and provided us with invaluable feedback, from the minutiae of writing technical books to many technical issues relating to the Java programming language. Marcus put the manuscript through his severe certification scrutiny regarding the specifics of the SCPJ2 exam. We are sorry to have upset their plans for Easter holidays, and hasten to thank them most profusely for taking on the task.

We cannot thank enough our own in-house, private copy-editor: Marit Seljeflot Mughal. She diligently and relentlessly read numerous drafts of the manuscript, usually at a very short notice. Marit claims that if she understood what we had written, then a computer-literate person should have no problem whatsoever. This claim remains to be substantiated. If any commas are not used correctly, then it is entirely our fault, in spite of being repeatedly shown how to use them.

We are also indebted to many Java-enabled individuals for providing us valuable feedback on parts of the manuscript for the second edition. This includes Pradeep Chopra, Seema R., and Gaurav Kohli at Whizlabs Software. Unfortunately for us, they only had time to read part of the manuscript. Thanks also to Torill Hamre at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, Bergen, for her useful comments and suggestions. We also thank the following Master students at the Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, for providing useful feedback: Mikal Carlsen, Yngve Espelid, Yngve A. Aas, Sigmund Nysæter, Torkel Holm, and Eskil Saatvedt.

Family support saw us through this writing project as well. Our families have put up with our odd and long working hours, endured our preoccupation and our absence at the dining table. Khalid would like to acknowledge the love and support of his wife, Marit, and daughters, Nina and Laila, while working on this book. Rolf would like to thank Liv, Rolf V., Knut, and Elisabeth for their love, patience and support.

?Khalid A. Mughal, 
Rolf W. Rasmussen                                                                                                                                 
March 2003 
Bergen, Norway