Fascinated with both machines and knowledge, Abbas is always learning new programming techniques. He got acquainted with Sphinx in 2009 and has been using it in most of his commercial projects ever since. He loves open source and believes in contributing back to the community.
Abbas is married to Tasneem and has a cute little daughter, Munira. He has lived in Nagpur (India) since his birth and is in no rush to move to any other city in the world. In his free time he loves to watch movies and television. He is also an amateur photographer and cricketer.
Abbas is currently working as Chief Operating Officer and Technical Manager at SANIsoft Technologies Private Limited, Nagpur, India. The company specializes in development of large, high performance, and scalable PHP applications.
Acknowledgement
My wife Tasneem and sweet little daughter Munira were patient throughout my writing adventure, and I want to thank them for giving me tremendous support and quiet space to work at home. I would also like to thank my mother for her moral support.
My inspiration was Dr. Tarique Sani, CTO of SANIsoft, who is my employer, mentor, and guru. I would like to thank him for his support and exchange of technical know-how. I would also like to thank my colleagues at SANIsoft who encouraged me in my endeavor.
I would also like to thank all the reviewers and editors who worked patiently with me. A special thanks to Aaron Rosario who worked sleepless nights during the final editing phase.
Richard Phillips of Utilitas Knowledge Management Limited, London, introduced me to Sphinx while I was working on one of his projects in 2009. He deserves special thanks and acknowledgment.
Last, but not the least; I would like to thank my brother who has been an inspiration all my life.
About the Reviewers
Paul Grinberg is an electrical engineer with a focus on embedded firmware design. As part of his work he has utilized many techniques that traditionally fall outside of his field, including a number of scripting languages. While learning PHP, Paul started contributing to the MediaWiki project by writing a number of extensions. One of those extensions was the Sphinx Search extension to improve the search capability of the MediaWiki engine.
I would like to thank Svemir Brkic, who is the co-author of the Sphinx Search extension for MediaWiki. I would also like to thank my wife for her understanding, flexibility, and support for my hobbies.
Kevin Horn has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University and has been creating web applications since 1998, when he accidentally became a web developer after running out of money for college. He's worked under almost every job title in the IT field, though he always seems to come back to programming. Despite working with a number of different languages, there's no doubt that his favorite is Python, as he will tell anyone who will listen (and some who won't).
Kevin lives in North Texas with his wife, two sons, and a couple of canine interlopers.
Kevin currently works as a semi-freelance programmer both through his own company and others. In his not-so-copious free time, he works on various open source Python projects, reads a truly ridiculous amount of fiction, and tries to figure out how to raise his offspring properly.
Thanks to the Packt team for making the process of reviewing my first book pretty darn painless. I'd also like to thank my wife, kids, and friends for putting up with me staring at the computer screen, when they'd much rather I be doing something else.
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