Head Rush Ajax

Elisabeth Freeman is an author, software developer, and digital artist. She's been involved with the internet since the early days, having co-founded The Ada Project (TAP), an award-winning website for women in computing now adopted by the ACM. More recently, Elisabeth led research and development efforts in digital media at the Walt Disney Company, where she co-invented Motion, a content system that delivers terabytes of video every day to Disney, ESPN, and Movies.com users. Elisabeth is a computer scientist at heart and holds graduate degrees in Computer Science from Yale University and Indiana University. She's worked in a variety of areas including visual languages, RSS syndication, and internet systems. She is a coauthor of O'Reilly's Head First Design Patterns. She's also been an active advocate for women in computing, developing programs that encourage woman to enter the field. These days you'll find her sipping some Java or Cocoa on her Mac, although she dreams of a day when the whole world is using Scheme. Elisabeth has loved hiking and the outdoors since her days growing up in Scotland. When she's outdoors her camera is never far. She's also an avid cyclist, vegetarian, and animal lover. Eric Freeman is a computer scientist with a passion for media and software architectures and coauthor of Head First Design Patterns. He just wrapped up four years at a dream job-- directing internet broadband and wireless efforts at Disney--and is now back to writing, creating cool software, and hacking Java and Macs. Eric spent a lot of the '90s working on alternatives to the desktop metaphor with David Gelernter (and they're both still asking the question, "Why do I have to give a file a name?"). Based on this work, Eric landed a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1997. He also co-founded Mirror Worlds Technologies (now acquired) to create a commercial version of his thesis work, Lifestreams. In a previous life, Eric built software for networks and supercomputers. You might know him from such books as JavaSpaces Principles Patterns and Practice. Eric has fond memories of implementing tuple-space systems on Thinking Machine CM-5s and creating some of the first internet information systems for NASA in the late 1980s. When he's not writing text or code you'll find him spending more time tweaking than watching his home theater and trying to restore a circa 1980s Dragon's Lair video game. He also wouldn't mind moonlighting as an electronica DJ. Brett McLaughlin has worked in computers since the Logo days (remember the little triangle?). In recent years, he's become one of the most well-known authors and programmers in the Java and XML communities. He's worked for Nextel Communications, implementing complex enterprise systems, at Lutris Technologies, actually writing application servers, and most recently at O'Reilly Media, Inc., where he continues to write and edit books that matter. His most recent book, Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook, is the first book available on the newest version of Java, and his classic Java and XML remains one of the definitive works on using XML technologies in Java.