Preface

This book is not a typical O'Reilly book, written as a cohesive manuscript by one or two authors. Instead, it is a new kind of book—a first, bold attempt at applying some principles of open source development to book authoring. About 200 members of the Python community contributed recipes to this book. In this Preface, we, the editors, want to give you, the reader, some background regarding how this book came about and the processes and people involved, and some thoughts about the implications of this new form.