Preface
This book is not a typical O'Reilly book, written as
a cohesive manuscript by one or two authors. Instead, it is a new
kind of booka bold attempt at applying some principles of open
source development to book authoring. Over 300 members of the Python
community contributed materials to this book. In this Preface, we,
the editors, want to give you, the reader, some background regarding
how this book came about and the processes and people involved, and
some thoughts about the implications of this new form.