Elliotte Rusty Harold is originally from New Orleans to which he returns periodically in search of a decent bowl of gumbo. However, he currently resides in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife Beth, dog Shayna, and cats Charm (named after the quark) and Marjorie (named after his mother-in-law). He's an adjunct professor of computer science at Polytechnic University where he teaches Java, XML, and object oriented programming. He's a frequent speaker at industry conferences including Software Development, Dr. Dobb's Architecure & Design World, SD Best Practices, Extreme Markup Languages, and too many user groups to count. He's currently working on the XOM Library for processing XML with Java, the Jaxen XPath engine, and the Amateur media player.