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Acknowledgements

When I first floated the idea of writing an Nmap book to the nmap-hackers mailing list, I was inundated with suggestions and offers to help. This outpouring of enthusiasm convinced me to proceed. My complete naivety about how much work was involved also contributed to my decision. It has been quite an undertaking, but what kept me going chapter by chapter was a private review group called the nmap-writers. They provided invaluable feedback, advice, and detailed review notes throughout the process. In particular, I would like to thank the following people:

  • Saurabh Bhasin contributed detailed feedback on a regular basis.

  • Mark Brewis could always be counted on for good advice.

  • Ellen Colombo was a big help from the beginning.

  • David Fifield wrote Chapter 12, Zenmap GUI Users' Guide and helped with many other sections of the book.

  • Brian Hatch has always been a big help.

  • Loren Heal was a continual source of ideas.

  • Dan Henage provided advice and proofread numerous chapters.

  • Tor Houghton reviewed every chapter, probably giving me more feedback than anyone else.

  • Doug Hoyte documented the many Nmap features he added, and also handled most of the book indexing.

  • Marius Huse Jacobsen reviewed many chapters, providing detailed feedback.

  • Kris Katterjohn performed thorough reviews of several chapters.

  • Eric Krosnes sent useful technical review feedback and also regularly nagged me about book progress. This was helpful since I didn't have a traditional editor to do so.

  • Vlad Alexa Mancini created the Nmap eye logo for the cover (and the Nmap web site).

  • Michael Naef kindly reviewed many chapters.

  • David Pybus was one of the most frequent contributors of ideas and proofreading.

  • Chuck Sterling provided both high level advice and detailed proofreading of several chapters.

  • Anders Thulin provided detailed reviews of many chapters.

  • Bennett Todd sent dozens of suggestions.

  • Diman Todorov wrote the first version of Chapter 9, Nmap Scripting Engine

  • Catherine Tornabene read many chapters and sent some of the most detailed feedback I've seen.

Technology used to create this book

As an author of open source tools myself, I'm a big believer in their power and capability. So I made an effort to use them wherever possible in creating this book. I wasn't about to write it in Microsoft Word and then handle layout with Adobe FrameMaker!

Nmap Network Scanning was written with the GNU Emacs text editor in the DocBook XML format.

The free online chapters are created from the XML using Norman Walsh's XSL Stylesheets and the xsltproc XSL processor

The print version also uses Norman's stylesheets and xsltproc, but the output is to the XSL-FO format An XSL-FO processor is then used to build a PDF. I would like to use Apache FOP for this, but a footnote-related bug prevents this, so I switched to the RenderX XEP Engine XEP is proprietary, but at least it runs on Linux. I hope to switch back to FOP after the footnote bug is fixed.

Cover layout was done with Scribus Raster graphics for the cover and internal illustrations was done with Gimp, while Inkscape was used for vector graphics.

Revision control was handled by Subversion and the free web chapters are serviced with Apache httpd


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