When Chris Duncan first asked me to do the foreword to his book, I didn't think it would be that tough to do. How hard could writing a foreword be? Compared to some of the projects I worked on in the past such as BoundsChecker, writing a book, or my current job of debugging others' impossible bugs, writing a foreword should be a piece of cake. However, within reading a couple of pages of The Career Programmer, I became extremely nervous because Chris is a far better writer than I can ever hope to be. The last thing I want to do is detract from great writing, and more importantly, an extremely...