About the Author

Nigel McFarlane (http://www.nigelmcfarlane.com) is the Mozilla community's regular technical commentator, focused on education, analysis, and a few narrowly scoped bugs. He works full-time on Mozilla matters, except when interrupted by other things. The core Mozilla hackers are slowly getting used to him.

Nigel writes extensively on Mozilla, Firefox, and open source, including the columns Searching for Substance at InformIT and Mozilla Meanderings for TUX . He contributes to a number of journals, including Inside Web Development and Linux Journal, numerous online publications, and to the W3C's sXBL specification.

In addition to writing, Nigel messes around with programming and waves his arms about. He sometimes consults to industry and government. He holds science degrees from the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University. He is the author of several JavaScript Web books (WROX Press) and the authoritative Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (Prentice Hall)the Mozilla community's favorite text in print. Other strong points are telecommunications, data systems, and the Web. On the human side, he spends a lot of time studying the forces and processes behind open source, invention, and online communities in general.

When not welded to the computer, Nigel enjoys Melbourne, Australia, his home city. It's often named the world's most livable city, and not without reason. Outdoors there are no computers, so bushwalking, swimming, music, and city rambles are great ways to relax.