Bruce Eckel is the author of numerous books and articles about computer programming. He gives frequent lectures and seminars for computer programmers, and was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ standard committee. His best known works are Thinking in Java andThinking in C++, aimed at programmers with little object-oriented programming experience. Most reviewers consider these books to be better written and more pedagogic than most introductory texts on Java or C++. He has since made both books available for all to download freely. However, his recent book, Thinking in Java, Fourth Edition, is no longer available in a free, electronic form.

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early '90s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid '90s; then Java and many of its frameworks beginning in the late '90s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front ends for Java based back ends. Prior to working at Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems. James Ward's blog can be found at www.jamesward.org.