Acknowledgments

The journey of this project was comparatively smooth, much smoother than my first book, Going Corporate. Thanks to Jeff Olson, an executive editor at Apress, and the entire Apress team. Jeff, also editor of my first book, picked up the idea of this book at a nascent stage.

We would like to thank development editor Anne Marie Walker, who did a great job of hand-holding while going through the manuscript. She helped improve the book in numerous ways. Kevin Walter, the coordinating editor of this book, did a wonderful job of project management and problem solving. He was the person through which we got all our work done within Apress. He created deadlines for completing each and every task in this project, and his meticulous follow-ups and facilitation made us complete this book right on schedule.

We are particularly thankful to Kim Wimpsett, the copy editor, for her patience in correcting mistakes and great assistance on the language part. Her suggestions for improving the overall presentation of the book were very useful. Dhaneesh Kumar was patient enough to take on all the final formatting and indexing work that brought this book into its current form. Thanks to him as well.

Together we formed a great international team that worked 24/7 on this project. When everyone was asleep in the United States, I and Venkat were working from Bangalore, and vice versa. It was a great experience indeed! And after such a long duration of working together, Apress is now like our immediate family. We both are looking forward to doing many more projects with Apress.

No book can succeed without the blessings of its readers. We have tried to keep this book as simple and example-oriented as possible. The needs of working professionals in the analytics industry were at the top of our minds while writing each chapter. At any time, we welcome you to interact with us via [email protected] and [email protected]. We are active on Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Any project of this size invariably creates a number of hardships for the family members of the authors and the development team. This book was no exception. Both I and Venkat owe the credit of completing this book on time to our respective family members. Without their help and support, it would not have been possible. We cheer them all. At the same time, we both feel lucky to have gotten an opportunity to present our work to readers worldwide.

Last but not least, there are relatively few people on this planet who make a living from writing, especially those who write professional books. This book was definitely not written for money. We firmly believe that whatever we are today is by the virtue of society. Writing is a beautiful and noble way to return something to our society, and we hope to continue with it in the future as well.

—Shailendra Kadre

I am thankful to everyone mentioned by Shailendra in the previous paragraphs. But I would like to mention personally a few people who worked exclusively with me in creating this book.

Sandeep Sunkara, a close friend of mine from IIT Bombay, patiently went through every page of this book. His expert technical suggestions were particularly useful. I am thankful to Swapnil Kitcha, now working with Fidelity as a specialist, for validating all the SAS code used in this book.

The acknowledgments wouldn’t be complete without a special mention of Gopal Prasad Malakar, who has been my analytics guru throughout my career. I would also like to mention Shailendra Kadre, the coauthor of this book, who envisioned, steered, influenced, and encouraged me throughout this work.

I sincerely thank the numerous students of my analytics training programs, who always encouraged me to document my lectures and who shaped my ideas, as they appear in this book.

This book would not have been possible without the sacrifices made by my wife, little son, and other family members, who saw me working late hours and were patient with me. Each one of them should get equal credit for bringing this book to fruition.

—Venkat Reddy Konasani