Rick Copeland is the author of O'Reilly's Essential SQLAlchemy which covers database programming in Python using the SQLAlchemy library. He is also a frequent speaker at the Python Atlanta user group, a periodic blogger on Python topics, and a contributor to several Python open-source projects including Ming, a schema validator and object/document mapper for MongoDB, Allura, the platform powering the rebirth of SourceForge.net, and Zarkov, the logging and aggregation platform used to compute SourceForge internal and external statistics.