Praseed Pai is a software engineering/re-engineering professional with good business acumen, technical competency, and software engineering skills. He has presented on various topics in more than two hundred technical events in the last decade and half. His areas of interest include software architecture, design patterns, domain-specific languages, engineering software development, computer graphics, and machine learning. Currently, he is associated with the UST global as a senior solutions architect in their consulting division. He is also the primary force behind the SLANGFORDOTNET compiler infrastructure, which has been ported to VB.NET (CLR), Java (JVM), C++ (LLVM), Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. He lives in the city of Kochi with his wife and two kids.
I would like to start off thanking my co-author Shine Xavier for undertaking this journey along with me. An important acknowledgment goes to my longtime collaborator and friend Shalvin PD, who introduced us to Denim Pinto of Packt. I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Aneesh P Revi, Nikhil Nair, Sarath Soman, Vaisakh Babu, Haridas Nair, John Thomas, Biju Alapat, Joseph Abraham, Shaji P Dayanandan, and members of the Kerala Microsoft Users Group (KMUG) while working on the content of the book. I would like to thank my parents, Mrs. Mohana T Pai and the late K.J. Thrivikrama Pai, who taught me the value of continuous learning. I whole heartedly thank my wife, Sandhya L Kammath, for giving encouragement and taking care of our domestic issues herself, while I was writing this book. Being a developer herself, I could get different perspectives on the content I was writing. Last, but not least, Sidharth Pai and Karthik Pai, my sons, for allowing me to concentrate on the book, by not bothering much with their usual demands! Finally, I thank the wonderful folks at Packt and the two reviewers who helped us to make the book better.
Shine Xavier is a core software engineering practitioner with an extreme passion for designing/building software solutions, application frameworks, and accelerators that help maintain productivity, code quality, performance, and security. His areas of interest include functional programming, interpreters, JavaScript library development, visual programming, algorithms, performance engineering, automation, enterprise mobility, IoT and machine learning. He is currently associated with UST Global as a senior architect, where he continues to provide technical leadership in customer engagements, pre-sales, practice development, product development, innovation, and technology adoption. He lives with his wife and three kids in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India.
I would like to start off thanking my colleague and mentor Praseed Pai for choosing me to co-author this book. It has been a joy and privilege penning this book along with you, my friend! There are others without whom I wouldn’t have been able to complete this book. In particular, I would like to thank: the folks at Packt (Denim Pinto, Pooja Mhapsekar, Siddhi Chavan, and Sunith Shetty) who were really patient and inspiring us throughout this journey and the technical reviewers Soumya Mukherjee and Vidya Vrat Agarwal, who really pushed us all along to get this book one knot better. This book has become a lot better and taken its present shape because of you all! My teachers and friends in school and college, mentors (Arun Narayanan and Sunil Balakrishnan), colleagues (Jeenu Mathew, Viby Abraham, Renju Ramadevan, Nikhil Nair, John Thomas, Renjith Ramachandran, Jenson Joseph, Ashok Nair, and Abhilash Ponnachan) and members of the computer science fraternity (many whom I paid my respects to in the book). You all continue to teach, motivate, and inspire me! My parents (Xavier and Grace) without whom I would cease to exist. My wife (Kavitha Jose) and kids (Joel, Sera and Johaan) for their whole-hearted love, support, and understanding in helping me realize this dream.