Bill Ball is a technical writer, editor, and magazine journalist and has been working with computers for the past 20 years. He first starting working with Linux, beginning with kernel version .99, after moving from BSD4.3 Machten for the Apple Macintosh. He has published more than a dozen articles in magazines such as Computer Shopper and MacTech Magazine and first started editing books for Que in 1986. An avid fly fisherman, he builds bamboo fly rods and fishes on the nearby Potomac Ricver when he's not driving his vintage MG sports cars. He lives at Aquia Harbor in Stafford Country, Virgina.
Nicholas Wells is an experienced author who began using Linux daily in 1994 while working as a technical writer at Novell. Linux is his main desktop environment and he is technically proficient in most aspects of UNIX. Nicholas started using StarOffice 3.1 when it first appeared for Linux in early 1997, but now uses StarOffice as his main working environment for word processing and spreadsheets.
R. Dean Taylor has over 14 years of channel-marketing experience in the computer industry working for companies such as Sanyo/Icon, IBM, WordPerfect, and Novell. He is currently responsible for channel marketing for Caldera Systems, Inc. Although he ha,, extensive experience in the computer industry, this is his first experience in professional writing and has discovered it to be extremely rewarding.