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 IPv6 Network Administration is a softshell turtle. There are many species of softshell turtle in North America, all of the family Apalone. Some of the most common species include the Florida softshell (Apalone ferox) and the Eastern spiny softshell (Apalone mutica). They are freshwater turtles, living in streams, ponds, and lakes. Instead of the hard shell that covers many turtles, the softshell turtle is protected by a brown or olive leathery carapace. They use their long, rounded noses for searching out food and as snorkels for breathing in the water.

The English language distinguishes between turtles and tortoises, but the Japanese language does not. Both are kame in Japanese. However, Japanese distinguishes between the softshell turtle on the cover (suppon) and kame. This is probably because suppon are a Japanese delicacy.

The tagline "teaching the turtle to dance" comes from the tradition of visiting http://www.kame.net to test if your IPv6 connection works. If you visit this web site using IPv6, the turtle icon at the top of the page dances. When you have IPv6 working, you have taught the turtle to dance. Colleen Gorman was the production editor and proofreader for IPv6 Network Administration. Sarah Sherman and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Lydia Onofrei provided production assistance. Johnna VanHoose Dinse wrote the index.

Ellie Volckhausen 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 written using LaTeX and CVS over IPv6. It was converted to DocBook Lite usinga Perl hack by David Malone. It was then 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 usingMacromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warningicons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Colleen Gorman, David Malone, and Niall Richard Murphy.