As with the first edition, this book would be a mere shadow of itself without the incredible contributions of Macromedia Flash MX's engineering, quality assurance, support, and product management teams. In particular, I can never thank Gary Grossman enough for his critiques, guidance, and patience, not to mention writing the Foreword. Other Macromedians who helped shape this text include: Jonathan Gay, Jeremy Clark, Eric Wittman, Michael Williams, Pete Santangeli, Matt Wobensmith, Ben Chun, Troy Evans, Lee Thomason, Bentley Wolfe, John Dowdell, Rebecca Sun, Janice Pearce, Brian Dister, Henriette Cohn, Jeff Mott, Michael Morris, Deneb Meketa, Tinic Uro, Robert Tatsumi, Colm McKeon, and Mike Chambers.
This book's editor is Bruce Epstein, who I am convinced is superhuman. His knowledge of writing and programming is exceptional, and his ability to bestow that knowledge upon a text is astonishing. I am uncommonly fortunate to be coached by such an outstanding editor (and author in his own right).
Next, it is my honor to present the technical reviewers of this edition, all of whom are members of Macromedia Flash MX's engineering team: Gary Grossman, Chris Thilgen, Gilles Drieu, Nigel Pegg, Slavik Lozben, and Michael Richards. Erica Norton edited the first edition. Thank you, my friends, for your time and devotion.
The beta readers for this edition are all renowned Flash developers for whom I have immense respect: Robert Penner (http://www.robertpenner.com), Dave Yang (http://www.quantumwave.com), Branden Hall (http://www.waxpraxis.org), Amit Pitaru (http://www.pitaru.com), Michael Kay (http://www.peep.org/wizard/), and Veronique Brossier (http://www.v-ro.com). This book's accuracy is in many cases the result of their keen eyes.
Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for setting a standard of thoroughness, quality, and accuracy in everything he publishes. And thanks to O'Reilly's Brian Sawyer, Claire Cloutier, Glenn Bisignani, Mike Sierra, Rob Romano, Edie Freedman, Sandy Torre, and the many copyeditors, indexers, proofreaders, and sales and marketing folks at O'Reilly who helped bring this book to the shelves.
I owe recognition to my good friend Derek Clayton for regularly sharing his programming expertise with me. Derek contributed the Perl code in Chapter 17, the Java XMLSocket server in the Language Reference, and a generic flat file database system, all available from the online Code Depot. He is also the lead developer of Unity Socket Server, moock.org's commercial application for creating multiuser applications in Flash (http://www.moock.org/unity).
To the Flash community: thank you for the inspiration and beauty you create. In particular, thanks to James Patterson, Yugo Nakamura, Naoki Mitsuse, Joshua Davis, James Baker, Marcell Mars, Phillip Torrone, Robert Reinhardt, Mark Fennell, Josh Ulm, Darrel Plant, Todd Purgason, John Nack, Jason Krogh, Hillman Curtis, Glenn Thomas, Hoss Gifford, Manuel Clement, Andreas Heim, Robert Hodgin, Margaret Carlson, Erik Natzke, Andries Odendaal, James Tindall, Jon Williams, Ferry Halim, Jobe Makar, Jared Tarbell, Geoff Stearns, Paul Szypula, Lynda Weinman, the beta readers listed earlier, and whomever I've inevitably omitted.
Many thanks and much love to my wife, Wendy Schaffer, to my parents, and to family and friends. Hopefully this edition wasn't as draining as the first.
And lastly I'd like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to read this book. I hope it helps to make my passion your own.
—Colin MoockToronto, CanadaDecember 2002
