Ziadé Tarek - Expert Python Programming

Tarek Ziad is CTO at Ingeniweb in Paris, working on Python, Zope, and Plone technology and on Quality Assurance. He has been involved for five years in the Zope community and has contributed to the Zope code itself.

Tarek has also created Afpy, the French Python User Group and has written two books in French about Python. He has gave numerous talks and tutorials in French and international events like Solutions Linux, Pycon, OSCON, and EuroPython.

Before starting with Chapter 1, I would like to thank a few people that helped me while I was writing this book:

The whole Python community of course, the AFPY user group, Stefan Schwarzer for his slides on optimization, his quote and his great feedback and reviews, Georg Brandl for reviewing Chapter 10 about Sphinx, Peter Bulychev for assistance on CloneDigger, Ian Bicking for assistance on minimock, the Logilab team for assistance on PyLint, Gael Pasgrimaud, Jean-Franois Roche, and Kai Lautaportti for their work on collective.buildbot, Cyrille Lebeaupin, Olivier Grisel, Sebastien Douche and Stfane Fermigier for various reviews.

Thanks to the OmniGroup and their great OmniGraffle tool; all diagrams were made with it (see http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle).

A very special thanks goes to Shannon "jj" Behrens who did a deep reviewing of this book.

Shannon -jj Behrens is the moderator of the San Francisco Bay Area Python Interest Group. While not technical editing Python books and hopping from startup to startup, he enjoys playing with his four kids and blogging at http://jjinux.blogspot.com.

I'd like to thank Tarek for patiently listening to all my critiques, and I'd like to thank my lovely wife, Gina-Marie Behrens, for protecting me from the kids long enough to finish editing the book.

Paul Kennedy is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is also Director of the Knowledge Infrastructure Laboratory in the UTS Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems. Dr Kennedy has been developing software professionally since 1989 with a career bridging industry and academia. He has worked with languages including C/C++ and Python and in such diverse areas as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and data mining. For the last ten years he has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in software engineering and data mining. He completed his PhD in Computing Science in 1998 and regularly consults to industry in data mining projects. He has been General Chair of the Australasian Data Mining Conference for 2006-2008, has actively contributed to international Program Committees, reviewed for international journals, and has more than 30 publications.

Wendy Langer first learned to program in Microbee Basic, in between bouts of playing 'Hunt the Wumpus' and 'Colossal Caves'. This all happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away. Many years later, she learned Fortran whilst studying for a physics degree at University. Finally, after a long period of wandering in the outer darkness, she discovered the perfect programming languagePython! Even though she currently spends more actual coding time using C++, her heart will always belong to Python.