A Note From Jeff Duntemann

Programmers (especially those just coming up to speed) often challenge one another with questions like, “How good are your tools?” There was a time when this was a valid question. Compilers, debuggers, servers, database engines, and all the rest were just coming out of the Stone Age. There were tremendous variations in quality and power from one tool to another. If you bet on the wrong toolset, you could be working harder than you needed to—or worse.

Today, the more pertinent question might be “How good are you?” Relentless competition has given today’s developer tools tremendous depth and amazing quality, such that a journeyman programmer is highly unlikely to push such tools to the limit. Long before your tools hit the wall, you will—unless you go the distance to learn everything you can about the tools that you use, and refine the skill with which you use them.

The Coriolis Group’s High Performance series was designed to help you take your tools deep. These books explain the advanced tool features that the intro books just can’t cover, and provide heavy-duty projects that force you to think through the development process at an expert’s level—using those head muscles that lie behind everything we could call skill.

You could discover this knowledge by beating your head against the technology, and trying things randomly until they work. Or you can benefit from the experience of our authors, who’ve been up this learning curve before and took notes along the way. We’ve chosen the topics, the authors, and the approaches carefully to ensure that you don’t get mired in introductory material you don’t need and irrelevant technology that you can’t use.

The goal is to take you and your chosen toolset as far as you choose to go. You’ve already got high-performance tools. Here’s to your success at becoming and remaining a high-performance developer.

—Jeff Duntemann

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been both a great accomplishment and a severe trial for me. I could not have accomplished this task without the support of my family and friends. Specifically, I’d like to thank my mother for putting up with me during my grouchy periods, my cats (Kit and Kat) for amusing me during the wee hours of the night, and my agent Valda Hilley for getting me involved with the project in the first place. I’d also like to thank the people at The Coriolis Group, including Ann Waggoner Aken, Mary Millhollon, Robert Clarfield, and a host of others.