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This book was written and typeset using LaTeX with the tufte-book document class, which provides the wide margins and sidenote layout inspired by the work of Edward Tufte. The text is set in Palatino; code listings use a monospaced font rendered by the listings package.

All of the services described in this book — normalization, RPC, discovery, routing, echo, configuration, caching, storage, and monitoring — are implemented in Rust and compile to standalone binaries. The code is intended to be read alongside the text. Simplicity was preferred over production hardening: the goal was to make each concept legible in a few hundred lines of code rather than to build software ready for deployment.

The web edition of this book is itself one of the systems it describes. The frontend is a raw TCP HTTP server written in Rust with no external web framework. It serves the book's chapters, manages user highlights through the storage and caching services, and presents a live dashboard showing the state of the running system. The entire constellation of services launches from a single shell script.

Large language models were used extensively in the preparation of both the manuscript and the code. They served as drafting partners, code reviewers, and tireless pair programmers. The author remains responsible for all errors, omissions, and questionable trade-offs.