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From APIDesign

Family

There is a reason why every book is dedicated to family. It is always harder to write it and it takes so much time, that the support and patience from all family members is more than needed. I wrote TheAPIBook in my spare time, after returning back from work and this indeed required a lot of understanding from my wife as she needed to spend more of her time to look over our children. Thanks a lot for that.

However not only my wife was affected by me spending a lot of time with TheAPIBook. By a chance, at the same time when I was finishing my work on the book, my wife needed to pass final exams at her university. As a result we needed a lot of help from the rest of the family as well. I'd like to namely thank to grandmother of my children for taking care of them and allowing me to finish TheAPIBook and my wife to finish the university. The book is officially dedicated to GeertjanWielenga and PatrickKeegan as without them it would never be translated to real English, however your name shall be on the thanks page as well, grandma.

Tim Boudreau

Tim deserves really big note in this thanks list, because, without him, I would never think about the possibility to write a book. I had my own notes and did a bunch of talks on the topic of API Design, however I never felt being capable of writing a book. It was Tim who once said: "Let's write a book describing how to write APIs that will stand the test of time." At that moment the journey of TheAPIBook started to materialize. Thanks for showing me that the book can become real, Tim.

At that time I still considered very likely that I will just co-author the book with Tim. However as Tim has always many things to do, we did not really proceeded anywhere and at the end I decided to publish the book by myself. Still, there is a lot of Tim's influence in the content of the book. Tim insisted on creating a methodology, which I described in the The_Future chapter. Tim also invented the term conceptual surface which is very good way to measure complexity of an API. At the end, Tim is not co-author of TheAPIBook, however he still remain one of the authors of many of the books ideas. Thanks Tim for contributing them.

Honzík Zahrádka

There can be a long way between knowing a journey and really taking it. Tim revealed me the possibility to write TheAPIBook, however I have not started to write it yet. I was waiting. I had my notes, but I was afraid to really undertake the journey and start to write, find a publisher, etc. This lasted till summer 2007, when, at one family garden party I met my wife's cousin, Honzík. I told him about the idea of writing a book and about my fear of really doing it. He said something like: "You know what to write about; you know it is an interesting topic; you know you are an expert in it. So... why haven't you started writing yet?". So cruel, but so true. At that time I decided that I need to write the first chapter, send it to publishers and if they do not refuse, really publish the book. I am glad that a year later, the book is available. Thanks Honzíku for pushing me forward at the right moment.