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| Preface |

## Acknowledgments

Many people helped in the creation of this book and I am grateful to them all. I am indebted to literally hundreds of readers of the first edition who wrote in with comments, suggestions, bug reports, and praise. Their many small contributions are scattered throughout the book. Also, my apologies to those who made the many good suggestions that could not be incorporated into this edition.

Paula Ferguson, a friend and colleague, edited both editions of the book. Her careful reading and always-practical suggestions made the book stronger, clearer, and more useful. She is also the one who prodded me when I started to slack off, and got me back on track when I started trying to turn Java in a Nutshell into Java in a Packing Crate.

Mike Loukides provided high-level direction and guidance for the first edition of the book. Eric Raymond and Troy Downing reviewed that first edition--they helped spot my errors and omissions, and offered good advice on making the book more useful to Java programmers.

For the second edition, John Zukowski reviewed my Java 1.1 AWT quick-reference material, and George Reese reviewed most of the remaining new material. This edition was also blessed with a "dream team" of technical reviewers from Sun. John Rose, the author of the Java Inner Classes Specification, reviewed the chapter on inner classes. Mark Reinhold, author of the character stream classes in `java.io`, reviewed my documentation of these classes. Nakul Saraiya, the designer of the new Java Reflection API, reviewed my documentation of the `java.lang.reflect` package. I am very grateful to these engineers and architects; their efforts have made this a stronger, more accurate book. Any errors that remain are of course my own.

Nicole Gipson Arigo was the production editor for this edition of the book, taking over the job from John Files, who produced the first edition. Nicole coordinated the entire production process, entered changes from edited copy, and handled the meticulous task of fixing line and page breaks in the manuscript. Madeleine Newell provided production assistance. Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary, Jane Ellin, and Sheryl Avruch performed quality control checks. Seth Maislin wrote the index. Chris Reilley created the figures, including all the detailed class hierarchy diagrams in Part V. [1] Edie Freedman designed the cover. Nancy Priest designed the interior format of the book and Lenny Muellner carefully implemented the format in troff, with help from Ellen Siever.

> [1] The hierarchy diagrams are loosely based on similar diagrams for Java 1.0 by Charles L. Perkins.

The whole production team has my thanks for once again pulling together all the pieces to create the finished product you now hold in your hands.

As always, my thanks and love to Christie.

David Flanagan
April 1997

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