It’s been a while since I first worked on a book with O’Reilly in 1997. That book was a practical guide to data structures and algorithms, a subject that, for the most part, had been defined many years before by some of the early giants of computer science (Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth, to name a few). By comparison, I’ve been able to witness the rapid evolution of the subject of this book from the front lines, and I have had the good fortune to help refine it myself while working as a web developer at one of the largest web applications in the world, Yahoo!
