
This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
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Preface
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Acknowledgments
My first noncurricular writing was a short science fiction story I wrote after having
been inspired by my third-grade teacher’s reading aloud to my class. The book he
read to us was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. So, I owe a
thank you to Mr. Dennis Streich, my third-grade teacher, for giving me a respect for
the social and educational importance of the medium of books. While I can’t blame
any of my bad writing habits on these two gentlemen, I can certainly credit them
with helping to cultivate my love of the written word—even when it’s about a geeky
subject like VoIP.
More recently, my reading and writing have been of an entirely different sort--the
vocational sort. When I worked for J. Walter Thompson in Detroit, I was flipped a
copy of O’Reilly Media’s epic masterpiece sendmail by one of the guys I worked
with. This book was a godsend. If anybody could translate a deadly topic like send-
mail configuration into terms I could understand, it was Bryan Costales and Eric All-
man, the authors of that highly important book. The accessibility and organic
approach of sendmail were common to most O’Reilly books, ...