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 tool on the cover of PC Hacks is a screwdriver. A mainstay of the household toolbox, the screwdriver is a device composed of a handle and a metal head, used to thread screws into material. The screws act as fasteners and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. A typical screw has a cylindrical or conical shaft ingrained with a helical groove and is topped with a head specially shaped to interlock with the head of the screwdriver.

While the ancient Greeks allegedly used wooden varieties of the screw as early as the first century B.C. as part of their wine presses, the screwdriver itself is a more modern invention. Witold Rybczynski's venerable cultural history of the screwdriver, One Good Turn, dates the first evidence of the tool's existence back approximately 500 years, when it was believed to have been used to thread metal screws into fifteenth-century armor. Sanders Kleinfeld was the production editor and proofreader for PC Hacks. Jane Ellin was the copyeditor. Emily Quill and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Ellen Troutman-Zaig wrote the index.

Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is from the Just Tools collection of the CMCD Library. Clay Fernald produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's Helvetica Neue and ITC Garamond fonts.

Melanie Wang designed the interior layout, based on a series design by David Futato. 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 Helvetica Neue Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. This colophon was written by Sanders Kleinfeld.