Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Softwar

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my wife Jill, of course, and to my parents Bob and Paula, sister Erin, and Grammy Alice.

The very first person I have to thank is Brian Jepson. I am indebted to Brian for many things, only a few of which have to do with this book. The original idea of creating a book about generating dynamic web graphics was his, and he has provided enough technical support over the past several years that I considered getting him an 800 number for Christmas. Brian deserves a paragraph to himself so I will stop this one here.

Thanks to everyone at O’Reilly, including editor Richard Koman, editorial assistant Tara McGoldrick, illustrator Robert Romano, production editor Jane Ellin, quality controllers Nicole Gipson Arigo, Sarah Jane Shangraw, and Sheryl Avruch, and everyone else “behind the scenes.” I’d also like to thank Andy Oram, Andrew Schulman, Linda Mui, and Katie Gardner for helping out early on, and Gina Blaber and Brian Jepson (again) for nice references.

Thanks to the prestigious group of technical reviewers who took a lot of time to help us remove all^[1] the typos, technical goofs, and boldfaced lies from the text: John Cristy, brian d foy, Bob Friesenhahn, Shishir Gundavaram, Mark Hershberger, Brian Jepson, Marc Lehmann, Randy J. Ray, Greg Roelofs, Lincoln Stein, and Martien Verbruggen.

Thanks to all my co-workers in the AS220 office for putting up with me for the past eight months and picking up the proverbial slack and dropped balls while I worked on The Book. They are: Umberto Crenca, Sheri Francine VanAntwerp, Geoff Griffin, Lizzie Araujo, Jill Colinan, Joe Auger, Chris Kilduff, Richard Goulis, Susan Kavanaugh, Mark Pedini, Kim Kazan, Lauren Brooke, and Scott Lapham. And of course, members of the SMT Computing Society (Josh Marketos, Scott Schoen, Jim Bray, Eric Moberg, and Geoff Griffin in particular) from whom I have learned the ins and outs (mostly the outs) of the Web over the past several years. Several artists allowed me to use their work in some of the examples herein: thanks to Winsor Pop for the cat in Chapter 5 Keith Munslow for various drawings, Jonathan Thomas for letting me use his head throughout, John Everett for the drawing in Chapter 9 Angel Dean for the photo in Chapter 1 and Umberto Crenca for the crow in Chapter 1.

Since a good deal of this book documents pieces of software created by others, I owe these good people a great debt for their efforts. I would like to thank Thomas Boutell for giving us the GD libraries and Lincoln Stein for the Perl version. Thanks to John Cristy who created (and tirelessly maintains and improves) ImageMagick, and Martien Verbruggen who created the GIFgraph module. Thanks to Marc Lehmann for crafting the Gimp-Perl interface. Some people still can’t believe that quality software can be produced by a group of people who are not being paid to write it. An oft-quoted response to this is that one of the motivations of free software developers is the all-too-infrequent “pat on the back.” Thus, I would like to pat all of the programmers who contibuted to Gimp 1.0, including: Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Manish Singh, Adrian Likins, Federico Mena Quintero, Xach Beane, Adam D. Moss, Sven Neumann, Misha Dynin, Chris Gutteridge, Peter Kirchgessner, Shuji Narazaki, Jens Lautenbacher, Tim Newsome, Eiichi Takamori, Scott Goehring, Seth Burgess, Michael Sweet, Josh MacDonald, Daniel Risacher, Andy Thomas, Brian McFee, Hirotsuna Mizuno, Karl-Johan Andersson, Miles O’Neal, Nick Lamb, Albert Cahalan, Alexander Schulz, Erik Nygren, Francisco Bustamante, Hrvoje Horvat, Jens Restemeier, Martin Edlman, Michael Taylor, Raphael Francois, Gordon Matzigkeit, Scott Draves, Brian Degenhardt, David Koblas, Thorsten Schnier, Torsten Martinsen, Reagan Blundell, Andrew Donkin, Andrew Kieschnick, Brent Burton, Edward Blevins, Daniel Cotting, Eric L. Hernes, Alan Paeth, John Schlag, Stephen Norris, Simon Budig, Graeme W. Gill, Jochen Friedrich, John Beale, Michael J. Hammel, Jörn Loviscach, Jens Restemeier, Kevin Turner, Lauri Alanko, Marcelo de Gomensoro Malheiros, Morten Eriksen, Norbert Schmitz, Owen Taylor, Sean Cier, Ed Mackey, Rob Malda, Tracy Scott, Thomas Noel, Tim Rowley, Tom Bech, Daniel Skarda, Vidar Madsen, Wolfgang Hofer, and Xavier Bouchoux (hopefully I haven’t left anyone out, but I’m sure I have; thanks to you too!).

I hope that this book will contribute to the free software cause, a phenomenon which I believe is a manifestation of an innate, timeless human instinct to share with others and contribute to the greater community of earthlings.

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^[1] This is actually a typo itself; it is impossible to remove all typos from a book. Check out the web site for an up-to-date errata listing.