ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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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, Chris Lee, 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 instru- 
mental 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. 

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, no- 
kogiri, 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. 

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. If I'm lucky, this book will help show people just how beautiful Ruby can be. 
Producing the technical content for this work was daunting, but only part of the overall 
picture. 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. 

Finally, 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 some- 
one important while compiling this list. To make sure these folks get their well deserved 
credit, please keep an eye on the acknowledgments page at http://rubybestpractices.com 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.