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 Programming Flash Communication Server is the brown bear (Ursus arctos). The range of the brown bear is the widest among all species of bears. They are found in localized populations in Eastern and Western Europe,across Northern Asia, and in Japan. In North America, brown bears are found in Western Canada as well as Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Although once abundant on the central plains of the United States, they have since been exterminated.

The brown bear is usually dark brown in color but can vary from a light cream color to almost black. If the tips of the guard hairs are white, they give the bear a grizzled appearance, hence the name grizzly bear, applied to the smaller of the two North American subspecies. Brown bears are distinguished by the characteristic muscle hump over their shoulders, which gives their front legs extra strength. Fully grown brown bears can weigh anywhere between 300 and 1,400 pounds, with males being characteristically larger than females. Even at this size, the brown bear can reach speeds of about 35 miles per hour for short intervals.

Brown bears live alone, except when females are accompanied by their cubs. During the fall they eat up to 90 pounds of food a day, including a diet of grasses, fruits, bulbs and roots, insects, fish, and small animals, to fatten up for the four to seven months of winter hibernation. The bear's normal heart rate of about 40 beats a minute drops during hibernation to as low as 8 beats a minute. Although brown bears can be awakened easily during their long sleep, the female bear doesn't wake up when her two cubs are born midwinter. The chipmunk-size bears crawl into a position where they settle in to nurse until spring. By the time the mother bear wakes up, her cubs are strong enough to follow her out of the den. Adam Witwer was the production editor, and Norma Emory was the copyeditor for Programming Flash Communication Server. Sada Preisch proofread the text. Sanders Kleinfeld and Emily Quill provided quality control. Julie Hawks wrote the index.

Emma Colby 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 Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Joe Wizda to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Lydia Onofrei.