A book is the result of the work of many people. Unfortunately, only the authors have their names on the cover. This section is only partial compensation for other individuals who helped out.
First, we want to thank Luca Bolognese for his efforts in giving us resources and contacts that helped us to write this book. Moreover, Luca has honored us by writing the foreword for this book. To find the right words to express our gratitude, we take the license to use our mother language. Grazie, Luca!
We also want to thank all the people from Microsoft who answered our questions along the way—in particular, Mads Torgersen, Amanda Silver, Erick Thompson, Joe Duffy, Ed Essey,
Yuan Yu, Dinesh Kulkarni, and Luke Hoban. Moreover, Charlie Calvert deserves special mention for his great and precious help.
If you understand what we wrote, we do not deserve all the credit. We had the good fortune to have some great people at Microsoft Press edit our drafts: John Pierce and Roger LeBlanc.
John has followed this project since we first had the idea for it; he helped us to stay on track, answered all our questions, remained tolerant of our delays, and improved a lot of our drafts. Roger has been so accurate and patient in his editing work that we really do not have words to explain the exceptional value of the job he did.
We want to thank the main technical reviewer, Christophe Nasarre, who has found errors that otherwise we would have missed. We also want to thank the many people who had the patience to read our drafts and suggest improvements and corrections. Big thanks to Alberto Ferrari, Bill Ryan, Cristian Civera, Diego Colombo, Luca Regnicoli, Roberto Brunetti, and Sergio Murru for their reviews.
Finally, we would like to thank Francesco Balena and Giovanni Librando, who supported us three years ago when we decided to try writing a book in English.