To Chinese readers:

We are truly pleased about your interest in our book and hope that it will help you to become a good programmer. The book represents a radically different approach to programming, an approach that emphasizes systematic design rather than tinkering. In other words, the distance between this approach and the conventional way is as large as the distance between Eastern and Western ways of thinking.

The book is gaining acceptance in the English, German, Polish, and Spanish speaking parts of the world. With this Chinese edition, we finally hope to reach the largest language block in the world, indeed the population with the fastest growing share of programmers.

A special thanks to the translators, Linpeng Huang and Chongkai Zhu, and to Hsing-Huei Huang for her help proofreading the translation.

Matthias, Robert, Matthew, and Shriram