It took me over eight months to reach this point writing an acknowledgment section. It was really an exciting journey. I owe these people in my endeavour to write this book and I'd like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude.

Thanks to Nikolaus 'niko' Gebhardt and Ambiera e.U. for initiating this wonderful Irrlicht engine project and making it open-source, sharing with the community, Christian Stenho for reviewing the book and giving lots of useful feedback and all the folks from the Irrlicht forum. And the following people from Packt Publishing; Newton Sequeira (Author Relation) for contacting me about this opportunity to write a book on Irrlicht, Usha (Acquisition Editor), Maitreya Bhakal (Development Editor), and Ashwin Shetty (Project Manager) for taking this project into reality, Michelle Quadros (Project Coordinator) for working and coordinating with me along the way, chapter-by-chapter, and Snehal Gawde (Technical Editor) for making sure everything fits together.

I'd like to thank my big brother and my parents, who've been supporting me all these years. Without all of your support I wouldn't have been here today.

And finally a big thank to my wife, Muriel. If she hadn't let me sit in front of my computer for hours, late nights, and weekends, writing this book, it wouldn't have been possible. Thank you for all your support. I love you.

Johannes Stein is an independent game developer and former student of the university of Augsburg, Germany. He started showing an interest in computer science at the early age of twelve and has expanded his knowledge ever since. After learning Visual Basic and Delphi, he got into C/C++ and C#, while he learned Objective-C and JavaScript, in the last few years. He specializes on cross-platform development, which means software that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X for example. Apart from cross-platform development, he has developed mobile games and web applications using the latest technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.

On several occasions, he worked as a freelance journalist and reported from yearly events such as the gamescom in Cologne.