Thomas Marlin provided me with the original Latin text of the Fibonacci problem you’ll find in Chapter 3.

Jason Hunter’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Java Servlet API was essential to the design and execution of the servlet code in this book. Donald Sizemore helped me get my servlets installed and running on IBiblio.

Luke Tymowski provided some of the RSS examples and helped me debug various problems with my Cobalt Qube.

Bruce Eckel and Chuck Allison helped me decipher the relative capabilities of Java and C++. Bruce Eckel also helped out with Python. Matt Sergeant and Brendan McKenna helped out with Perl. Philip Nelson, Robert A. Casola, and Rob Smith helped with Visual Basic. None of these people necessarily agree with what I wrote about those relative capabilities; (In fact, more often than not they vehemently disagree; de linguis non disputandum est); but I couldn’t have done it without them.

Although this is the sixth book I’ve written about XML, it is the first one I’ve written in XML. That could not have happened without Norm Walsh’s Docbook DTD and XSL stylesheets for Docbook.

Many people helped out with comments, corrections, and suggestions. These include Payman Aliverdi, Sergey Astakhov, Janek Bogucki, Dagmar Buggle, William Chang, Richard Dedeyan, Paul Duffin, Lacey Anne Edwards, Peter Elliott, Paul Erion, Bernard Farrell, Wei Gao, Scott Harper, Stefan Hässig, Martin Henke, Markus Jais, Oliver Korpilla, Igor Kostjuhin, Alexander Krumpholz, Wes Kubo, Ramnivas Laddad, Manos Laliotis, Ian Lea, Frank Lee, Ray Leyva, Rob Lugt, Richard Monson-Haefel, Gary Nichols, James Orenchak, Milton Quiroga, Aron Roberts, Carlo Rossi, Raheem Rufai, Arthur E. Salwin, Peter Sellars, Diana Shannon, Andrew Shebanow, and Fred Trimble. Mike Blackstone deserves special thanks for his copious notes.

Mike Champion, Andy Clark, Robert W. Husted, Anne T. Manes, Ron Weber, and John Wegis did yeomanlike service as technical reviewers. Their comments substantially improved the book.

As always, the folks at the Studio B literary agency were extremely helpful at all steps of the process. David Rogelberg, Sharon Rogelberg, and Stacey Barone should be called out for particular commendation.

This is my first book for Addison-Wesley, but it’s not going to be my last. They were all wonderful people to work with, and I look forward to working with them again. Mary T. O’Brien shepherded this book from contract to completion. Alicia Carey ably managed submissions and communications.

Finally, as always, my biggest thanks are due to my wife Beth without whose love and understanding this book could never have been completed.