# Preface

## About the manual

Before starting on the subject of the Triceps CEP itself, I want to tell some things about the organization of this manual.

It had grown quite large, and if it were printed on paper, I would have divided it into at least three volumes. But in the electronic form it's more convenient as a single document, this way the cross-references between any parts of it work seamlessly.

The manual keeps living and growing together with Triceps itself. As things change in Triceps, they change in the manual, but sometimes it's difficult to track down and update all the mentions of the changed subject. I've been spending a huge effort on tracking all such instances down but sometimes things slip through. Keep this in mind and don't be too scared when some paragraph says something contradictory.

A known issue with this manual is that it tends to describe the subjects in the bottom-up fashion, starting from the low-level details and then building up to the high-level concepts. This is partially because the manual has been growing together with Triceps, which is being built from the ground up. And partially it's because I like the details. When I read about a product, I want to understand, how exactly it works. When I write, I want to convey this information. I rewrote some of the chapters to put the high-level descriptions up front. But it's a huge work that will take some time to complete for the whole manual. In the meantime, I'd rather not delay the releases for it, they've been already slowed a lot by the documentation work. So it will get better with time, and in the meantime, if you feel that some details are too much for you, feel free to skip over them.

There are great many other improvements that can be done to the manual, and they will eventually be done. But my take on it is that it's better to have an imperfect manual now than a perfect one in some distant future. It had already been too long in the works, writing the manual for the version 2.0 had taken a whole year, and then it has baan a long time between versions 2.0 and 2.1.

## Some concepts

When talking about the CEP programs, I often use the term model. What is a model? It's basically a CEP program. And more about the models and about what is the CEP itself is described in .

Many of the examples are built around the world of stock trading. In the modern times almost everyone is probably familiar with the basics of this area. But if case if you're not, let me tell the most fundamental thing needed for understanding the examples: what is a symbol.

When the stock shares of some company are traded on an exchange, this company gets assigned a short identifier. This identifier is known as the stock symbol for this company. This word is also often used to mean not just the identifier but also the shares denoted by it. If a company has multiple classes of shares, each class would have its own symbol. And if a company is traded on multiple exchanges, each exchange may have its own identifier for its shares. The options and other derivative financial products also have their own symbols.

model