Acknowledgments

Writing this book would not have been nearly as exciting if Brendan Eich and his team at Netscape had not kept adding new features as I wrote! I, and many JavaScript developers, owe Brendan a tremendous debt of gratitude for developing JavaScript, and for taking the time out of his crazy schedule to answer our questions and even solicit our input. Besides patiently answering my many questions, Brendan also read and provided helpful comments on the beta edition of this book.

Nick Thompson and Richard Yaker at Netscape were also very helpful during the development of the book. Nick answered many of my questions about LiveConnect, and took the time to review and comment on a draft of Chapter 19, LiveConnect: JavaScript and Java. Richard found answers for me to many miscellaneous questions, and also provided me with the list of known bugs that are described in Appendix B, Known Bugs. Lynn Rollins, a partner at R&B Communications, and a contractor for Netscape, pointed out errors in the Beta edition of the book and also shared with me some of the less publicized features of JavaScript in Navigator 3.0.

Much of my information about Internet Explorer comes from Shon Katzenberger Ph.D., Larry Sullivan, and Dave C. Mitchell, three of the primary developers of Microsoft's version of JavaScript. Shon and Larry are the Software Design Engineers who developed Microsoft's version of the JavaScript interpreter and Microsoft's version of the JavaScript client-side object model, respectively. Dave was the Test Lead for the project. All three reviewed the Beta edition of the book and provided me a wealth of information about Internet Explorer that was simply lacking before. Dave was particularly helpful in answering my last minute questions about IE's capabilities.

Neil Berkman, a software engineer at Bay Networks in Billerica, MA, as well as Andrew Schulman and Terry Allen at O'Reilly were technical reviewers for the Beta edition. Their comments made that edition (and therefore this one) stronger and more accurate. Andrew was also the editor for the Beta edition of this book, and Frank Willison is editor of the current edition. I am grateful to them both.

David Futato was the production manager for this edition of the book and the last. He coordinated the whole process of production, and for the Beta edition, it was he who worked weekends and nights in order to give me time to squeeze the last few new Beta 6 features in. Chris Reilley produced the figures for the book. Edie Freedman designed the cover, and Nancy Priest and Mary Jane Walsh designed the internal format, which was implemented by Lenny Muellner, with help from Erik Ray. Seth Maislin indexed this book.

Finally, my thanks, as always and for so many reasons, to Christie.