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. A black swan is featured on the cover of Programming with GNU Tools. Swans are large aquatic birds that, along with ducks and geese, belong to the family Anatidae. There are seven species of swan distributed through all of the continents except Antarctica. The black swan is a native of Australia, but is now distributed throughout the world.

Unlike most species of Anatidae, female and male black swans share the duty of incubating the eggs. The gray chicks are able to swim almost immediately after hatching, but often hitch rides on their parents' back when tired. Black swans are also almost alone in not adapting their breeding season to the climate they live in. That means that their young hatch during the warmest time of the year in Australia, but in winter in Europe and North America, the hardest time of year for them to survive.

Because of their arching necks and graceful beauty, and because they mate for life, people have long held a romantic fascination with swans. They are the subject of numerous fairytales, legends, and works of art. Swans were once believed to hold special powers because, being animals of the water, air, and land, they were believed to live between all three of these worlds. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them.

... Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on Nutshell Handbooks, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.

The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest. Text was prepared by Erik Ray in SGML DocBook 2.4 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 troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 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 created in Macromedia Freehand 5.5 by Chris Reilley.