This book is the brain child of my kind editor Linda Lamb, as part of a series of books for end-users. When I saw the proposal for What You Need To Know When You Can’t Find Your UNIX System Administrator, I marched to my boss to say “sign me up for that!” I know it sounds implausible, but that’s pretty close to how it happened.

Why was I so interested? Because it was an opportunity to write about UNIX and computing in general in language that anyone can understand. Too many of our books are written with the underlying attitude, “If you aren’t interested, you should be!” They’re written for people who think computers are neat and just can’t get enough of them.

This is fine for most of our books, which are written for computer professionals. But whenever I help a coworker with a problem here at our office, I realize that there’s this disenfranchised class of users who don’t know much about computers and don’t particularly care. They don’t want to be power users, and they shouldn’t be made to feel as if they should be.

Here’s my pet peeve. Every night I watch the TV weatherman tell us what the weather was today, show us a radar map of the region, and then explain how a low-pressure system over the Rockies will be pushed up by a high-pressure system coming up from the Gulf, and so on and so on. And I become truly annoyed, because all I want to see is the five-day forecast showing the pattern of sun, snowflakes, and high temperatures for the coming week. If we’re going to get some rain on Tuesday, I don’t particularly care why, all I want to know is that I should carry an umbrella.

Just as most TV viewers aren’t meteorologists, most UNIX users aren’t computer scientists. And just as I think that TV weather forecasts should cut ahead to the five-day forecast, I can tell that most of the people I try to help with problems just want me to hurry up and get it fixed.

Now, we aren’t going to write books for people who don’t care at all, since they don’t buy books. But this was an opportunity to write a book for people who only care as much as they have to.

Enough about me...on to the acknowledgments.

Before anyone else, I’d like to thank all the people who agreed to be interviewed and then have their faces splashed across the pages of this book. Those gallant individuals are: Jane Appleyard, Joan Callahan, Mary Jane Caswell-Stephenson, Edie Freedman, Nicole Gipson, Tanya Herlick, Paul Kleppner, Rebecca Kondos, Linda Lamb, Allen Noren, Eric Pearce, Dick Peck, Arsenio Santos, Mike Sierra, Ellen Siever, Carol Vogt, Linda Walsh, and Frank Willison.

I’d like to thank the reviewers of the book. Within O’Reilly & Associates, I’d like to thank Rebecca Kondos, Tim O’Reilly, Eric Pearce, Arsenio Santos, Ellen Siever, Norman Walsh, and Frank Willison. External to O’Reilly & Associates, I’d like to thank Dan Barrett of UMass Amherst, Peg Schafer of Harvard University, and Pat Wilson of Dartmouth College. Also, I’d like to thank Ellie Young of Usenix for recommending reviewers for the book.

Many thanks and appreciation to those who worked on the production of this book. They include Clairemarie Fisher O’Leary, Nicole Gipson, Kismet McDonough, Kiersten Nauman, Jennifer Niederst, Nancy Priest, Mike Sierra, and Ellen Siever. I was astounded by how my random scribbles were turned into the crisp, elegant, and (of course) error-free product you hold in your hand.

Finally, I’d like to thank my patient and pleasant editor, Linda Lamb, for her inexhaustible support while I slowly plugged along. In addition to interviewing at least half our subjects, Linda was the one who maintained a clear vision of the book while I faltered. All this while working on a book of her own.

You’ll notice that up until this section, I’ve used the first-person plural “we” in place of “I.” This is because I’ve thought of this book as a collaboration between Linda and me, and it was only when I had to acknowledge her in the third person that I felt forced to use the singular.