Preface

The universe, perhaps, is just a crazy runtime environment with sparse documentation and seemingly random side effects, and life is nothing more than a program written in a language called "Universcript." I conclude that this might be the case because, when I decided to invoke my audition method in the fall of 2008 to try out for the role of Moritz Stiefel in a local production of Spring Awakening, I never expected that it would return a Book object.

Fortunately, not all things are that quirky. The universe might think that it's a great idea to take my botched audition and turn it into a writing opportunity—an API decision I fully approve, by the way—but most programming languages behave more predictably. Some languages behave predictably ...

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