About the Author

Jon Orwant is a Motorola Fellow at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he develops personalized electronic newspapers and games, and supervises the User Modeling research effort. He has lectured internationally on user modeling and electronic newspapers, and has represented the Media Laboratory on television and radio. He has taught courses in mathematics, computer science, and cryptography, and is the editor-in-chief of The Perl Journal.

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been an immensely pleasing experience, but not a solitary one.

Thanks to my technical reviewers: Tim Bunce, Paul Marquess, Tye McQueen, Mike Stok, and especially Tom Christiansen. Their selfless contributions to the Perl community, and to this book, are appreciated.

Thanks to Walter Bender of the MIT Media Lab for providing the opportunity to work on this pile of paper—a charitable act, considering our shared goal of replacing atoms with bits.

Thanks to my other colleagues at the MIT Media Lab who helped out, many of whom have inadvertently learned Perl during the past three months: Alan Blount, Amy Bruckman, Pascal Chesnais, Klee Dienes, Judith Donath, Dan Gruhl, Jill Kliger, Michelle McDonald, and Chris Verplaetse. Amy and Dan were especially helpful.

Thanks to those at the Waite Group Press who made this book possible: managing editor John Crudo, content editor Heidi Brumbaugh, copy editor Deirdre Greene, artist Larry Wilson, layout designer Tina Quarequio, and the rest of the WGP production staff.

Thanks to Adam Back, Diego Garcia and Kyle Pope for their extracurricular contributions.

Thanks to my MIT reviewers: Jennifer Healey, Everest Huang, and Michael Powers, whose efforts prove that the firehose occasionally stops gushing.

And of course, thanks to Larry Wall for creating Perl, and the members of p5p for maintaining, developing, and extending it.

—J.O.

Cambridge, Massachusetts