Java Servlet Programming

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to say a big thank you to the book’s technical reviewers, whose constructive criticism has done much to improve this work: Mike Slinn, Mike Hogarth, James Duncan Davidson, Dan Pritchett, Dave McMurdie, and Rob Clark. We’re still in shock that it took one reviewer just three days to read what took us a full year to write!

Jason Hunter

In a sense, this book began March 20, 1997, at the Computer Literacy bookstore in San Jose, California. There—after a hilarious talk by Larry Wall and Randall Schwartz, where Larry explained how he manages to automate his house using Perl—I met the esteemed Tim O’Reilly for the first time. I introduced myself and brazenly told him that some day (far in the future, I thought) I had plans to write an O’Reilly book. I felt like I was telling Steven Spielberg I planned to star in one of his movies. To my complete and utter surprise, Tim replied, “On what topic?” So began the roller coaster ride that resulted in this book.

There have been several high points I fondly remember: meeting my editor (cool, she’s young, too!), signing the official contract (did you know that all of O’Reilly’s official paper has animals on it?), writing the first sentence (over and over), printing the first chapter (and having it look just like an O’Reilly book), and then watching as the printouts piled higher and higher, until eventually there was nothing more to write (well, except the acknowledgments).

There have been a fair number of trying ...