Biographical note

Alex Martelli spent 8 years with IBM Research, winning three Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards.He then spent 13 as a Senior Software Consultant at think3 inc, developing libraries, network protocols, GUI engines, event frameworks, and web access frontends. He has also taught programming languages, development methods, and numerical computing at Ferrara University and other venues. He's a C++ MVP for Brainbench, and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He currently works for AB Strakt, a Python-centered software house in Goteborg, Sweden, mostly by telecommuting from his home in Bologna, Italy. Alex's proudest achievement is the articles that appeared in Bridge World (January/February 2000), which were hailed as giant steps towards solving issues that had haunted contract bridge theoreticians for decades. Anna Martelli Ravenscroft is an experienced speaker and trainer, with diverse background developing curricula for church, regional transit, disaster preparedness; developing web applications for therapy, learning, fitness; writing technical books, articles and presentations; active member of Open Source community; skilled at translating between IT professionals and end users. Steve Holden Is a consultant, advising clients on system and network architectures and the design and implementation of programmed web systems. He also teaches classes on TCP/IP, network security, database and programming topics, and is the author of "Python Web Programming", the O'Reilly School of Technology's "Certificate series in Python" and O'Reilly Media's "Intermediate Python" video series. Steve has spent time on both sides of the "academic divide", and was an early researcher into the integration of text, graphics and database while teaching system development topics at Manchester University. This research led Steve to form Desktop Connection Limited, the first UK reseller of Frame Technology's (now Adobe's) FrameMaker software. His customers included British Telecom, British Aerospace, British Gas, and Sun Microsystems. Born and raised in the UK, Steve has travelled throughout Europe and the USA on teaching assignments. He now lives in Portland, OR, the USA's open source epicenter, where when not consulting, teaching or writing he enjoys looking for worthwhile American beers, entertaining friends and family, and reading science fiction.