Writing the first edition of this book was a grueling task that took two and a half years and the help of many people. After the toll it took on my health and sanity, I promised that I'd never put myself through such an experience again.

I've many people to thank for helping me break that promise. Foremost is my wife, Fumie. If you find this book useful, thank her; without her support and understanding, I would have never had the sanity to make it through what turned out to be almost a two year complete rewrite.

I also appreciate the support of Yahoo! Inc., where I have enjoyed slinging regular expressions for five years, and my manager Mike Bennett. His flexibility and understanding allowed this project to happen.

While researching and writing this book, many people helped educate me on languages or systems I didn't know, and more still reviewed and corrected drafts as the manuscript developed. In particular, I'd like to thank my brother, Stephen Friedl, for his meticulous and detailed reviews of the manuscript. The book is much better because of them.

I'd also like to thank William F. Maton, Dean Wilson, Derek Balling, Jarkko Hietaniemi, Jeremy Zawodny, Ethan Nicholas, Kasia Trapszo, Jeffrey Papen, Dr. Yadong Li, Daniel F. Savarese, David Flanagan, Kristine Rudkin, Shawn Purcell, Josh Woodward, Ray Goldberger, and my editor, Andy Oram. Also thanks to O'Reilly's Linda Mui for navigating this book through the pre-publication minefield and keeping the troops rallied, and Jessamyn Reed for creating the new figures this edition required.

Special thanks for providing an insider's look at Java go to Mike “madbot” McCloskey, Mark Reinhold, and Dr. Cliff Click, all of Sun Microsystems. For .NET insight, I'd like to thank David Gutierrez and Kit George, of Microsoft.

I'd like to thank Dr. Ken Lunde of Adobe Systems, who created custom characters and fonts for a number of the typographical aspects of this book. The Japanese characters are from Adobe Systems' Heisei Mincho W3 typeface, while the Korean is from the Korean Ministry of Culture and Sports Munhwa typeface. It's also Ken who originally gave me the guiding principle that governs my writing: “you do the research so your readers don't have to.”