Evan Pipho

F

irst off, thanks to my parents for letting me do this; without their support and putting up with not seeing me most of the summer this would have never been possible.

A big thanks to Trent Polack for helping me secure this book deal and for being an awesome friend and programmer. Without you I would have never made it to where I am today.

I can’t forget all of the great people over at gamedev. net, flipcode. com, and their associated chat rooms. You guys have been invaluable in helping me sort through problems, squash bugs, and are just great friends. There are too many to name, but a few who have proved to be invaluable have been Nicholas Cooper, Sean Kent, Denis Lukianov, Ron Penton, and Henrik Stuart.

To my friend and lifesaver Amy for forcefully dragging me away from my computer and out of my room every so often; it kept me from going insane.

Thanks to all of my other friends who put up with not seeing me much at all during the summer.

Last, but definitely not least, a huge thanks to the people over at Premier Press, especially Mitzi for sticking with me the whole time I was writing. Your support has been terrific, even through computer, Internet, and communications problems. All of the editors who worked on this have been great; all of you have taught me many valuable lessons as I have worked on my first book. I hope to work with all of you again.

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Evan Pipho has always been interested in computers and electronics.

As a young child, he learned to operate his dad’s IBM PC, playing games, and experimenting with the many programs it contained.

While playing with his dad’s Windows machine, he started to look at languages such as QBASIC and C and to pursue his life-long interest in game development. He had decided a long time ago that he wanted to pursue game development, so he dug right in. After some classes at the nearby community college and several maddening months in front of the computer, he was hooked!

You can visit the author’s forums at http://www. codershq. com. Click the Forums link. If you prefer private email to public forums, you can contact him at evan@codershq. com.

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