Almost all of the software that I have used in the creation of this book are free and open source software. In the first draft of this book, I had used Red Hat 9.0 Linux as the foundation of my setup and now for this sixth draft, I am using Fedora Core 3 Linux as the basis of my setup.

Initially, I was using KWord to write the book (as explained in the History Lesson in the preface). Later, I switched to DocBook XML using Kate but I found it too tedious. So, I switched to OpenOffice which was just excellent with the level of control it provided for formatting as well as the PDF generation, but it produced very sloppy HTML from the document. Finally, I discovered XEmacs and I rewrote the book from scratch in DocBook XML (again) after I decided that this format was the long term solution. In this new sixth draft, I decided to use Quanta+ to do all the editing.

The standard XSL stylesheets that came with Fedora Core 3 Linux are being used. The standard default fonts are used as well. The standard fonts are used as well. However, I have written a CSS document to give color and style to the HTML pages. I have also written a crude lexical analyzer, in Python of course, which automatically provides syntax highlighting to all the program listings.