Acknowledgments

We thank our technical reviewers, Justin Zobel, Harry Williams, S.M.M. (Saied) Tahaghoghi, and Rasmus Lerdorf, for their expertise and diligence in helping to improve this book. We also thank our editor, Lorrie LeJeune, and her editorial assistant, Sarmonica Jones. We acknowledge the support of our employer, RMIT University; Hugh thanks the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, and David thanks the Multimedia Database Systems group. We also thank our colleagues, who throughout this project have provided ideas, suggestions, and help. In particular, we thank Abhijit Chattaraj for his help with the MySQL implementation of session support, and Derryn Grabowski and Jakub Korab for their help with an initial prototype of the winestore application.

Last, but most importantly, we thank our wives, Selina Williams and Louise Excell. Very little of this book would exist without Selina's support of Hugh's hectic schedule; he's now looking forward to supporting her through the birth of their first child. Louise has been especially patient with David throughout this project, and looks forward to his support in bringing up their second child, William. David also thanks his daughter Beth; the wisdom of her advice in dealing with a troublesome PC was far beyond her three years: "now, just press one key at a time."