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 VB.NET Core Classes in a Nutshell is a crawfish. Crawfish, or crayfish, are freshwater crustaceans. They can be found all over the world, but more than half of the approximately 500 species are found in North America.
Crawfish are similar in structure to lobsters, though much smaller (3 to 4 inches long). A crawfish's head and thorax are joined, followed by a segmented body. The head has a sharp snout, eyes on moveable stalks, and sensory antennae. It has four pairs of walking legs, which it also uses to probe for food, and two claws that extend from the front of its body, used for pinching. Crawfish are brown or greenish, except for some cave-dwelling types that are colorless and eyeless.
Females lay anywhere from 10 to 800 eggs at a time, which attach to the females' swimming legs until they hatch. Newly hatched crawfish look like miniature adults. They molt 6 to 10 times in the first year during rapid growth, then less often in the second year. Crawfish usually live only two years.
Crawfish are considered a delicacy in the southern United States, particularly in Louisiana, where they play an important role in Cajun cuisine. Crawfish are a key ingredient in many of the most famous Cajun dishes, such as crawfish etouffée, seafood gumbo, and crawfish boil. Many southern towns and cities host annual crawfish festivals. These festivals often feature all-you-can-eat crawfish eating contests, in which people have been known to consume up to 50 pounds of crawfish in one sitting! Linley Dolby and Catherine Morris were the production editors for VB.NET Core Classes in a Nutshell. Catherine Morris was the proofreader. Emily Quill, Linley Dolby, Ann Schirmer, and Claire Cloutier provided quality control.
Pam Spremulli designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font. David Futato produced the CD label with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.
David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. The print version of this book was created by translating the DocBook XML markup of its source files into a set of gtroff 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 --gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to XML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff 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 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 Linley Dolby and Claire Cloutier.
