Acknowledgments

Writing a book requires dedication and sacrifice—mostly from one's family and friends.
There were many weekends when I had to stay home writing, and I'm grateful for the
patience everyone has shown me. This includes my wife, Vicky, my parents, Rhonda and
Leonard, and my grandmother, Afton. It also includes all my buddies who wanted me to
come out and play—especially the ones who wanted me to help out with engineering
gigs.

Once again, I've had a couple of phenomenal technical editors. Vicky read through every
word of the book, including the functional reference. The story gets fairly predictable in
those middle chapters, so I really appreciate her effort. Shannon "JJ" Behrens provided
valuable feedback, including catching some of my "hand-waving".

No PHP book is complete without thanks going out to the PHP developers. It might seem
like a cliché, but Rasmus Lerdorf really is a nice guy. Take the opportunity to hear him
speak if you have it. The contributions of Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans are
tremendous. I would like to thank Andi in particular for providing the foreword to this
book. There are too many people to thank individually, but one other person deserves
mention: Egon Schmid. Aside from improving PHP's online manual, he never fails to
answer every query about books on the mailing list with the URL to the books page on
the php.net site.

Working with Prentice Hall has been a pleasure. I've enjoyed the wisdom and guidance of
Mark Taub. The rest of the team were always professional.

Finally, let me thank all the people who bought the first edition of Core PHP
Programming, especially those who took the time to send me email. The response has
been overwhelmingly positive. I'm delighted to have introduced so many people to PHP.