Acknowledgments

When you first have an idea for a book (in my case, while drinking good coffee in a Brighton cafe), it is the subject matter alone that grips you. In the enthusiasm of the moment, it is easy to forget the scale of the undertaking. I soon rediscovered the sheer hard work a book demands, and I learned once again that it's not something you can do alone. At every stage of this book's development, I have benefited from enormous support.

In fact, my thanks must predate the book's conception. The themes of this book first saw the light of day in a talk I gave for a Brighton initiative called Skillswap (www.skillswap.org) run by Andy Budd. It was Andy's invitation to speak that first planted the seeds of the idea in my mind. For that, I still owe Andy a pint and much thanks.

By chance, attending that meeting was Jessey White-Cinis, another Apress author, who put me in touch with Martin Streicher, who commissioned the book for Apress straightaway.

My thanks go out to both Jessey and Martin for seeing potential in the slightest of beginnings.

Once again the Apress team has provided enormous support in the face of a very tight deadline, and my tendency to go quiet as I moved with my family to a new continent in the middle of the project.

Thanks to Steven Metsker for his kind permission to re-implement in PHP a brutally simplified version of the parser API he presented in his book Building Parsers in Java.

Writing to a deadline is not conducive to family life, and so I must send my thanks and love to my wife, Louise, and to our children, Holly and Jake. I have missed you all.

Since the publication of the first edition, I have been lucky to receive much enthusiastic and constructive feedback from readers. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to reply to everyone individually, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all correspondents for your messages.

The soundtrack to the writing of the first edition was provided by John Peel. John was a broadcaster who waged a 40-year war on the bland and mass-produced in music simply by championing everything original and eclectic he could lay his hands on. John died suddenly in October 2004, leaving listeners around the world bereft. He had an extraordinary impact on many lives, and I would like to add my thanks here.