I owe a debt of gratitude to David Barnes, the Senior Acquisition Editor at Packt Publishing for his initial acceptance and giving me an opportunity to create this work. I am highly grateful to the whole team at Packt Publishing for their constant cooperation and contribution to create this book.

My gratitude to Chris Rodrigues, who as a Development Editor offered a significant amount of feedback that helped to improve the chapters. He played a vital role in improving the structure and the quality of information.

I must thank Muhammad Adil, the Technical Reviewer for his excellent, detailed reviewing of the work and the many helpful comments and suggestions he made.

Special thanks to Aditi Suvarna, the Technical Editor for first class structural and language editing. I appreciate her efforts in enhancing the contents of the book and giving it a polished look.

I also thank Alwin Roy, the Production Coordinator for doing excellent formatting and making the book dramatically better.

A big and ongoing thanks to Vishal Bodwani, the Project Coordinator for doing a great job and sincere efforts by the whole team to get the book published on time.

A great big thank you to the editorial and production staff and the entire team at Packt, who worked tirelessly to produce this book. I really enjoyed working with each one of you.

I am also thankful to my family — my small world; Anushka (my wife) and my two little darlings, Chirag and Naman for allowing me to work on the book even during the time that I was supposed to spend with them.

I should not forget to thank my dear students who have been a good teacher for me as they make me understand what basic problems they do face in a subject and enable me to directly hit at those topics. It is because of the endless interesting queries of my students that help me in writing the books with a practical approach.