About This Manual

This manual was written during a Book Sprint sponsored by Google and facilitated by FLOSS Manuals. The manual was written in two days but the maintenance of the manual is an ongoing process to which you may wish to contribute.

Since the manual may be updated at any time, you may wish to periodically check here for updated versions :
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About the Authors

This manual exists as a dynamic document on flossmanuals.net, and over time will have an ever-increasing pool of authors and contributors.

The following individuals were part of the 2009 GSoc Book Sprint. We thank them for their tireless efforts to create this first-of-its-kind volume.

Alexander Pico
Alex works at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco as a Bioinformatics Software Engineer. He holds a PhD in Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics and has over 10 years of bioinformatics experience in data mining, analysis, visualization and integration. Over the past 5 years he has led the GenMAPP pathway analysis project, managing software development and coordinating research projects involving wet lab biologists and senior programmers. Alex is a member of the Cytoscape core development team, a creator of SNPLogic.org, and a founder of WikiPathways.org. He has also administered GenMAPP's participation in the Google Summer of Code program for the last 3 consecutive years.
http://nextnucleus.org

Bart Massey
Bart Massey graduated Reed College in 1987 and spent two years as a software engineer at Tektronix, Inc.  He received his this MSc in Computer Science from University of Oregon in 1992 and his PhD in 1999 for work with the Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory there.  Since then, Bart has taught at Portland State University, where he is currently an Associate Professor, and for the Oregon Master of Software Engineering program. Bart is Secretary of the X.Org Foundation Board; his current research interests include open tech, software engineering, desktop interfaces and state space search.
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~bart

Jonathan "Duke" Leto
Jonathan is an open source hacker who currently focuses on the Parrot Virtual Machine and Rakudo, Perl 6 on Parrot, as well as being the maintainer of many CPAN modules, many with a focus on scientifc computing and cryptography. He first was a mentor for Math::GSL in GSoC 2008 and then became organization administrator for The Perl Foundation's involvement in GSoC 2009 as well as being the mentor for Math::Primality. Jonathan received a masters in mathematics from University of Central Florida and has published several papers in the field of differential equations. He enjoys discovering wheels within wheels.
http://leto.net

Jennifer Redman
Jennifer has over fifteen years of hands-on technical experience as a data center and information systems architect and administrator.  Jennifer is currently the Associate Systers-Keeper for Systers, the oldest International online community of technical women. When not tinkering with her servers and installing new flavors of Unix or Open Source apps, Jennifer travels to interesting and sometimes "you went where?" sort of places. Previous careers included canvassing for Greenpeace and as a staff member on a national (and successful) presidential campaign. She also reads a lot of books.
http://www.buunabet.org/

Leslie Hawthorn
Leslie held various roles at Google before joining the Open Source Programs Office in March 2006. Her first project after joining the team was spinning up Google Summer of Code 2006 and she has managed the program ever since. She also conceived, launched and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, an initiative inspired by GSoC that helps pre-university students get involved with all aspects of open source development. Mentoring in open source communities is one of her personal passions, along with humanitarian uses for open source software. She loves to cook, read and can occasionally be found pining for illuminated manuscripts. She also likes to think of herself as a superb filker.
http://www.hawthornlandings.org

Olly Betts
Olly is the lead developer of the Xapian search engine library. He's been working on Xapian for 10 years, and makes a living as a freelance developer and consultant on Xapian-related projects. In GSoC, he's represented SWIG as a mentor in 2008, and a mentor and co-admin in 2009.  Olly is originally from the UK where he studied mathematics and then computer science at Cambridge University, but now lives near Wellington in New Zealand. He once broke a toe falling off a cliff in Majorca.
http://survex.com/~olly/

Selena Deckelmann
Selena works for End Point Corporation and is an enthusiastic open source advocate and PostgreSQL specialist. She is co-chair of Open Source Bridge conference, a conference for open source citizens. She currently leads PDXPUG, a PostgreSQL Users Group, and helps organize Code n Splode, a programming group whose goal is to get more women involved in open source. In her spare time, she likes to mix drinks for her local Perl and Postgres user groups, and fetch eggs from her chickens (when she has them).
http://chesnok.com/daily

Facilitation

The Book Sprint was facilitated by :

Adam Hyde
Adam is the founder of FLOSS Manuals. FLOSS Manuals is a community of 1500 (at the time of writing) volunteers that create quality free documentation about free software. FLOSS Manuals is pioneering the Book Sprint methodology that enables the development of well written manuals on free software in 2-5 days. Adam has facilitated over 15 Book Sprints on Free Software including Inkscape, OLPC, Sugar, CiviCRM, Firefox, Introduction to the Command Line, Digital Foundations (conversion to free software examples), Ogg Theora, How to Bypass Internet Censorship, Open Translation Tools, PureData, Video Subtitling and now the Google Summer of Code Mentors Guide. Adam is also the Project Manager for the development of 'Booki' - the forthcoming free software Collaborative Authoring Platform.
adam@flossmanuals.net