Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of Effective awk Programming, Third Edition, is a great auk, a powerful symbol of nineteenth-century European and American arrogance toward nature. In using great auks as food and for their oil, and later collecting specimen for the kind of trivial display so popular with the inhabitants of mansions in Victorian England, mankind showed no mercy; mankind did not take care to effectively manage the few delicate populations as sustainable resources, much less treat the great auk as a living species worthy of respect. In 1844, sailors working for a British collector killed the last two great auks and stole their incubating egg on an island off the coast of Iceland.

The original penguin, great auks were large, black and white, flightless seabirds with pronounced, bent, orange beaks. The auks nested for three to four weeks each spring on craggy islands in the North Atlantic. When not nesting with their lifelong mates, great auks swam the seas in extended-family groups, occasionally deep-sea diving for large fish. Sixteenth-century sailors who exploited nesting populations for food during long voyages called the birds penguins, a name they also gave to the smaller-beaked seabirds of the Southern Hemisphere that still exist today. Jeffrey Holcomb was the production editor for Effective awk Programming, Third Edition. Claire Cloutier was the production manager. Mary Brady was the copyeditor, and Maureen Dempsey was the proofreader. Rachel Wheeler, Matt Hutchinson, and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Kimo Carter and Matt Hutchinson provided production support. Arnold Robbins and Nancy Crumpton wrote the index. Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. Using a version of makeinfo modified by Phillippe Martin to create DocBook and enhanced by the author, the book was converted by the author from the Texinfo source into DocBook XML. Arnold then post-processed the generated DocBook with no less than six awk scripts (of course!), finally tuning the DocBook source files by hand. The print version of this book was created by translating the DocBook XML markup of its source files into a set ofgroff macros using a filter developed at O'Reilly & Associates by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff "mgs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to XML and implemented the book design. The GNUgroff text formatter Version 1.11.1 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Sarah Jane Shangraw.