Acknowledgments

A huge thank you to my wonderful wife, Ava, for her unending patience with me. This book would have been considerably poorer without her improvements in clarity and consistency throughout. I am also very grateful to Mike Loukides and Kirk Pepperdine for the enormously helpful assistance I received from them while writing this book. Their many notes have helped to make this book much clearer and more complete.

Thanks also to my reviewers for the first edition, Patrick Killelea, Ethan Henry, Eric Brower, and Bill Venners, who provided many useful comments. They identified several errors and added good advice that makes this book more useful. For the second edition, the J2EE chapters were reviewed by Jim Elliott, Jim Farley, and Ethan Henry.

This edition has benefited from feedback from many, many people, and I'm very grateful to everyone who took the time to give me their opinions and helpful suggestions. Thank you very much.

I am, of course, responsible for the final text of this book, including any erroors tthat rremain.