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Acknowledgements:

Over the course of writing Ruby Best Practices, I was thoroughly supported by
my friends, family, and fellow hackers.  I want to thank each and every one of
the folks who've helped out with this book, because it would not have existed
without them.  

This book did not have a typical technical review process, but instead was
supported by an excellent advisory board who participated in group discussion
and the occasional review as each chapter was released.  These folks not only 
helped catch technical errors, but helped me sketch out the overall vision for
how the book should come together as well. Participants included James Britt, 
Francis Hwang, Hart Larew, Jeremy McAnally and Aaron Patterson.  

Rounding out the group was the best pair of guiding mentors I could hope for, 
Brad Ediger, and James Edward Gray II.  Both have published Ruby books, and
have worked with me extensively on a number of Ruby projects.  James and Brad
were both instrumental in producing this book, and to my career as a software
developer in general.   I have learned a ton from each of them, and thanks to
their help with RBP, can pass their knowledge on to you.

Many folks also offered comments and feedback either through Rough Cuts on
Safari or via email after reading a sample chapter.  In particular, I'd like
to thank Rob Biedenharn, Othmane Benkirane, Antonio Cangiano, David Masover, 
and Karel Minařík for their insightful comments.  In addition to these folks,
I'd also like to thank the several other readers who offered feedback 
anonymously, if not by name.

When the book was still young, with only a few chapters completed, a couple of
folks were still happy to help me spread the word.  Special thanks goes out
to Peter Cooper from "Ruby Inside" and Pat Eyler from "On Ruby" for conducting
some interviews with me and getting the buzz going.

Much of the source in this book comes from the open source Ruby community.
While I talk about my own projects (Prawn and Ruport) a lot, most of the code 
I show is actually from other contributors or at least originated from good
ideas that came up in mailing list discussions, feature requests, etc.  In
addition to these two projects, I also have benefited from studying a whole 
slew of other gems, including but not limited to:  activesupport, builder, 
camping, faker, flexmock,  gibberish, haml, highline, lazy, nokogiri, 
pdf-writer, and rspec.  Great thanks go out to all of the developers of these
projects, who I've tried to acknowledge directly wherever I can throughout 
the text.

My editor Mike Loukides and the entire O'Reilly Production team have made
publishing this book a very comfortable experience.  After overcoming major
fears about the hurdles of working with a mainstream publisher, I've found
the folks at O'Reilly to be helpful, accommodating, and supportive.  It is
especially nice that this book will become an open community resource less
than a year after it prints.  This measure is one I hope to see other 
technical book publishers adopt, and one I'm very thankful that O'Reilly was
open to.

While they were not directly involved in this book, I also need to
thank a few Ruby luminaries for inspiring me to care about well-crafted 
Ruby code in the first place.  In addition to those already mentioned, 
I want to acknowledge David A. Black, Hal Fulton, Zed Shaw, Dave Thomas, 
Jim Weirich, whytheluckystiff and the late Guy Decoux for their contributions 
to the Ruby community.  

Of course, without Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), we wouldn't have Ruby in 
the first place.  After writing this book, I am more impressed than ever
by the language he has designed. 

Lastly, I need to thank the folks who've helped me keep my sanity while 
working on this huge project.  My future wife Jia Wu has been amazingly
supportive of me, and has helped make sure that I occasionally ate and slept
while working on the book.  On the weekends, we'd usually escape for an 
bit and spend time with my close friends and family.  Though they didn't
have anything to do with the book itself, without Pete, Paul, Mom, Dad, and
Vinny, I doubt you'd be reading this book right now.  Thanks to all of you,
even if you'll never need to read this book.

So many people helped out in countless different ways, that I'm sure I've 
missed someone important while compiling this list.  To make sure these folks
get their well deserved credit, please keep an eye on 
http://rubybestpractices.com/acknowledgements and let me know if there is
someone that needs to be added to the list.   But for now, if I've forgotton
to list you here, thank you and know that I've not forgotten what you've
done to help me.