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 animals featured on the cover of this book are bobacs, or Asian marmots. Close relatives of the marmot family include squirrels and gophers. There are eight species of marmot in Eurasia and six in North America. The bobac was prominent in the European Soviet Union before being pushed out by agriculture, and it now lives primarily in Central Asia.
Marmot's bodies are designed for digging, having muscular shoulders, widely set forelegs, and thick, blunt claws. Up to 90 percent of a marmot's life is spent in the underground lodges they build and maintain through generations. Because marmots don't like to stray far from the safety of their lodges, they build extensive networks of entrances and tunnels to the main lodge. They leave their lodges for only a few hours each day, and much of that time is spent sunbathing on the mounds of dirt their digging creates by the tunnel entrances.
Marmots eat mainly green plants, but they will, on occasion, eat animal flesh. A young marmot can eat up to 30 percent of its body weight each day throughout the summer. Adults eat 11-13 percent of their body weight daily. By summer's end marmots often gain so much weight that they can barely move. This apparent gluttony is necessary to survive the winter's hibernation. Depending on the species of marmot, hibernation lasts from three to nine months. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them.
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Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on other Nutshell Handbooks. The beasts themselves are adapted from nineteenth century engravings from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Adobe Photoshop 2.5 and QuarkXPress 3.3 for the Macintosh, using the ITC Garamond font. The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman and Jennifer Niederst.
Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros, using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU gtroff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.08 was used to generate PostScript output. The figures were created in Aldus Freehand 4.0 by Chris Reilley and Hanna Dyer. Screenshots were processed using Photoshop 2.5. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.
