my gratitude for the following people (and many otherscannot be fully expressed in this short acknowledgment as alwaysmitch waite had the java thing figured out before anyone else he also let me bounce the applets off him until they did the joband extracted the overall form of the project from miasma of speculation my editorkurt stephanfound great reviewersmade sure everyone was on the same pagekept the ball rollingand gently but firmly ensured that did what was supposed to do harry henderson provided skilled appraisal of the first draftalong with many valuable suggestions richard wrightjr as technical editorcorrected numerous problems with his keen eye for detail jaime ninoph of the university of new orleansattempted to save me from myself and occasionally succeededbut should bear no responsibility for my approach or coding details susan walton has been staunch and much-appreciated supporter in helping to convey the essence of the project to the non-technical carmela carvajal was invaluable in extending our contacts with the academic world dan scherf not only put the cd-rom togetherbut was tireless in keeping me up to date on rapidly evolving software changes finallycecile kaufman ably shepherded the book through its transition from the editing to the production process acknowledgments to the second edition my thanks to the following people at sams publishing for their competenceeffortand patience in the development of this second edition acquisitions editor carol ackerman and development editor songlin qiu ably guided this edition through the complex production process project editor matt purcell corrected semi-infinite number of grammatical errors and made sure everything made sense tech editor mike kopak reviewed the programs and saved me from several problems last but not leastdan scherfan old friend from previous eraprovides skilled management of my code and applets on the sams web site