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Andreas M. Antonopoulos 2014-09-29 11:36:52 -04:00
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This book represents the efforts and contributions of many people. I am grateful for all the help I received from friends, colleagues and even complete strangers, who joined me in this effort to write the definitive technical book on crypto-currencies and bitcoin.
The journey to becoming an author starts long before the first book, of course. I owe my love of words and books to my mother Theresa Delaney, who raised me in a house with books lining every wall, encouraged me to read books for pleasure and instilled in me a deep respect for language. My mother also bought me my first computer in 1982, despite being a self-described technophobe. My father, Menelaos Antonopoulos, a civil engineer who just published his first book at 80 years old, was the one who taught me logical and analytical thinking and a love of science and engineering. Thanks also to Jean de Vera for her early encouragement to become an author and for always believing and insisting that I had a book in me.
The journey to becoming an author starts long before the first book, of course. I owe my love of words and books to my mother, Theresa, who raised me in a house with books lining every wall, encouraged me to read books for pleasure and instilled in me a deep respect for language. My mother also bought me my first computer in 1982, despite being a self-described technophobe. My father, Menelaos, a civil engineer who just published his first book at 80 years old, was the one who taught me logical and analytical thinking and a love of science and engineering. Thanks also to Jean for her early encouragement to become an author and for always believing and insisting that I had a book in me.
My first language (and schooling) was Greek, so I had to take a remedial English Writing course in my first year of university. I owe thanks to Diana Kordas, my English Writing teacher, who helped me build confidence and skills that year. Later, as a professional, I developed my technical writing skills on the topic of data centers, writing for Network World magazine. I owe thanks to John Dix and John Gallant who gave me my first writing job as a columnist at Network World and to my editor Michael Cooney and my colleague Johna Till Johnson who edited my columns and made them fit for publication. Writing 500 words a week for four years gave me enough experience to eventually consider becoming an author.
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Thanks to Cricket Liu, author of O'Reilly title "DNS and BIND" who introduced me to O'Reilly. Thanks also to Michael Loukides and Allyson MacDonald at O'Reilly who worked for months to help make this book happen. Allyson was especially patient when deadlines were missed and deliverables delayed as life intervened in our planned schedule.
The first few drafts of the first few chapters were the hardest, because bitcoin is a difficult subject to unravel. Every time I pulled on one thread of the bitcoin technology, I had to pull in the whole thing. I repeatedly got stuck and a bit despondent as I struggled to make the topic easy to understand and create a narrative around such a dense technical subject. Eventually, I decided to tell the story of bitcoin through the stories of the people using bitcoin and the whole book became a lot easier to write. I owe special thanks to Richard Kagan and Pamela Morgan who helped me unravel the story and get past the moments of writer's block, reviewing the early drafts of the book. Thanks to the developers of the San Francisco Bitcoin Developers Meetup group and Taariq Lewis, the group's co-founder, for helping to test the early material.
The first few drafts of the first few chapters were the hardest, because bitcoin is a difficult subject to unravel. Every time I pulled on one thread of the bitcoin technology, I had to pull in the whole thing. I repeatedly got stuck and a bit despondent as I struggled to make the topic easy to understand and create a narrative around such a dense technical subject. Eventually, I decided to tell the story of bitcoin through the stories of the people using bitcoin and the whole book became a lot easier to write. I owe thanks to my friend and mentor, Richard Kagan, who helped me unravel the story and get past the moments of writer's block, and Pamela Morgan who reviewed early drafts of each chapter and asked the hard questions to make them better. Also, thanks to the developers of the San Francisco Bitcoin Developers Meetup group and Taariq Lewis, the group's co-founder, for helping to test the early material.
During the development of the book, I made early drafts available on Github and invited public comments. More than a hundred comments, suggestions, corrections and contributions were submitted in response. Those contributions are explicitly acknowledged, with my thanks, in <<github_contrib>>. Special thanks to Minh T. Nguyen who volunteered to manage the Github contributions and added many significant contributions himself. Thanks also to Andrew Naugler for infographic design.