AN EXTENSION OF THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT PAGE

Cover Art

The Big Prime picture is copyrighted © 2003 by Matt Harvey. It was first drawn for Chris Caldwell for his site, The Prime Pages. My gratitude to both of these people for their permission to use the drawing for the front cover.

Cover Design

I created the cover using OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 © 2000–2007 by Sun Microsystems, Inc. OpenOffice.org is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

ISBN Bar Code

The online bar code generator, bookland, was used to create the ISBN bar code symbol for the back cover. There are ways you can support the free software, but the author, Judah Milgram, would appreciate as well an autographed copy of your title.

Although it was not absolutely necessary, I added a preview to the eps file generated by bookland using GSview 4.9 prior to saving the cover file to pdf in OpenOffice.org. GSview is a GUI for Ghostscript and was wriiten by Russell Lang at Ghostgum Software Pty Ltd.

Typesetting

The entire document was written in LaTeX, implemented for Windows using the MikTex distribution (I have version 2.5 installed). The MikTex project is headed by Christian Schenk. (And, of course, big thanks to Donald Knuth, who started it all.)

As for the text editor of my choice, I fancy Notepad++, authored by Don HO. I happen to have the outdated version v3.9 still in use.

PDF Creation

The later versions of LaTeX handle quality pdf conversion with no hassle. I followed the more traditional way: from dvi to ps via dvips with the -Ppdf option, and then to pdf using GSview (since I already have it installed anyhow). I have not investigated the differences, if any, between the print-ready pdf file generated in this manner and that created directly using the pdflatex command.

Proofreading

To confess, I have not made an effort to persuade anyone to proofread the manuscript in a professional way. However, if the book proved to be worth all the hard work, there is always an opportunity for a second edition...

Publishing Team

The people at BookSurge have been very helpful and responsive in every instance of our communication. Particularly, I thank my publishing consultant Roy Francia and account manager Jenny Parnow for their kind attentions and promptness in the efforts to seeing the book published.

Moral Support

Last but not least, my wife Ester and two children have had a very instrumental role in providing moral support. Thank God for their patience, understanding, encouragement, and prayers throughout the long process of writing and editing.