The book’s interior design was created by Daniel Will-Harris, who used to play with rub-on letters in junior high school while he awaited the invention of computers and desktop publishing. However, I produced the camera-ready pages myself, so the typesetting errors are mine. Microsoft^® Word for Windows Versions 8 and 9 were used to write the book and to create camera-ready pages, including generating the table of contents and index. (I created a COM automation server in Python, called from Word VBA macros, to aid me in index marking.) Python (see www.Python.org) was used to create some of the tools for checking the code, and would have been use for the code extraction tool had I discovered it earlier.

I created the diagrams using Visio^® – thanks to Visio Corporation for creating a useful tool.

The body typeface is Georgia and the headlines are in Verdana. The final camera-ready version was produced in Adobe^® Acrobat 4 and taken directly to press from that file – thanks very much to Adobe for creating a tool that allows e-mailing camera-ready documents, as it enables multiple revisions to be made in a single day rather than relying on my laser printer and overnight express services. (We first tried the Acrobat process with Thinking in Java, and I was able to upload the final version of that book to the printer in the U.S. from South Africa.)

The HTML version was created by exporting the Word document to RTF, then using RTF2HTML (see https://www.sunpack.com/RTF/) to do most of the work of the HTML conversion. (Thanks to Chris Hector for making such a useful, and especially reliable, tool.) The resulting files were cleaned up using a custom Python program that I hacked together, and the WMFs were converted to GIFs using JASC^® PaintShop Pro 6 and its batch conversion tool (thanks to JASC for solving so many problems for me with their excellent product). The color syntax highlighting was added via a Perl script kindly contributed by Zafir Anjum.