1. Acknowledgments

Our work on this book has been aided by a number of people, in ways both obvious and subtle.

Patrick O’Brien was instrumental in getting this project off the ground and Marjan Bace, our publisher at Manning Publications, gave us the chance to make it happen. Jackie Carter was our first editor at Manning and Lianna Wlasiuk came in at a crucial juncture, and, like a great bullpen pitcher, earned the save. We would like to thank our production team at Manning and every-one who worked behind the scenes on the book, especially our copyeditor Elizabeth Martin and our typesetter Denis Dalinnik. Big thanks also to our agent Laura Lewin for her help and understanding.

We’ve benefited a great deal from the generosity of programmers world-wide in creating the technologies used in this book. First on that list is the crew who developed the wxWidgets foundation of wxPython: Julian Smart, Vadim Zeitlin, Robert Roebling, and the rest of the core wxWidgets team, as well as many contributors. Of course, without Guido van Rossum and other members of the Python language development team, there would be no “Python” in “wxPython.” A large part of this book was written using the jEdit text editor and the images were manipulated using the GIMP.

Thanks also to the many reviewers who looked at the manuscript in its vari-ous stages of development and added their valuable insight along the way. They helped make this a better book: Alex Martelli, Dave Brueck, Christopher Bailey, Mike Stok, Jean Baltus, Thomas Palmer, Jack Herrington, Peter Damoc, Nick Coghlan, Pim Van Heuven, John Paulson, Ian Brown, Stefan Neis, Chris Mellon, Kevin Ollivier, and Doug Tillman. Special thanks to Clint Howarth who was our technical proofreader.

NOEL RAPPIN My wife, Erin, makes my life better every day. Thank you for your strength, your intelligence, and your love. I also want to thank my parents Donna and Donnie and my sister Michelle for supporting me fully and com-pletely. Matt Cohen helped this effort by entertaining me via IM while I was try-ing to write. Finally, I want to thank my daughter Emma, who is now old enough to be excited to see her name in a book, and my son Elliot, in anticipation of the day he will also be glad to see his name.

ROBIN DUNN I’d like to thank my wife, Malaura, and my children, Jordyn, Myka, Samuel, and Christian, for their patience, understanding, and love. You make it worth the effort to get past all the difficulties of life. I’d also like to thank the many wonderful members of the wxPython user community whose praise and excitement have helped me to stay motivated and have helped me to take wxPython from an interesting toy to a very useful tool that thousands of develop-ers all around the world love and depend upon. And finally, many thanks go to Mitch Kapor, John Anderson, David Surovell, and others at the Open Source Applications Foundation for believing in the Open Source concept, the poten-tials of wxPython, and especially for believing in my capabilities and funding my work on wxPython for several years.