Michael Ernest - Java SE 7 Programming Essentials

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Dear Reader,

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To Jocelyn, my love

Just hours before this writing, I received an email from Kathryn Duggan, this books development editor, saying the last chapter had now entered the pitiless, gaping maw of production. Let the grinding and forging begin. For this part of the process, I have to listen at a distance and make sense of the whirs and groans this material might force from the machine. I have to wonder what rough edges I missed that will now be cast in bronze, buffed into a high relief, and given prominence. What best parts will end up in some corner shadow or made to rest against the wall? I dont know. The wait is almost as hard as the writing.

What weve put into this book, though, is our combined best effort to oil that machine, a result of collaboration, faith, rerevising, and just a little lip biting. As this book goes into the mill, I am proud to have worked with every one of its contributors.

Kathi guided this project with an unfailingly positive spirit and saw it through more than one rough patch, all the while having to pick up and move several hundred miles, then find a house. Without her diligence, kind words, and tolerance for my sprint-and-coma style of submitting chapters, I am not sure Id have gotten this far, at least not in 2012. Thank you, Kathi; no one can expect the level of effort and encouragement you put into this book.

Ernest Friedman-Hill served as my technical editor, checking both the code and the rationale of the narrative for accuracy and consistency. You, good reader, will never again see such a bargain struck for a book of this sort. Ernest is an accomplished computer scientist, a professional of talents and abilities beyond my ken, an author in his own right, and a JavaRanch colleague whose work and contributions I have admired for over a decade. This book could have become a pale farce without his attention, his advice, and his drive on improving, well, everything. Yes, everything, right down to creating an alternate cover (which was ignored, sadly). I owe him big-time. I pledge here to pay his generosity forward. When you come across a section you think is especially sharp, Id be pleased if you remembered Ernest for it (too). Paul Nahay reviewed the manuscript and, so far as I could tell, observed each punctuation mark with suspicion. He uncovered error after error we somehow missed. These are errors an author might forgive as understandable lapses, but errors that a disinterested eye might view as a sign of wavering competence. It can be a thankless role, and Paul did it fearlessly. Thank you, Paul.