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 featured on the cover of Programming Perl is a camel, a one-humped dromedary. A hoofed mammal, relative of the llama and alpaca, camels first appeared 38 million years ago and once populated all large land masses but Australia. For some unknown reason, they died off in all but the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and North Africa, and now only two species remain, the one-humped dromedary and the two-humped bactrian. The dromedary is the larger and stronger of the two, standing seven feet tall at the top of its hump and able to carry an average load of 400 pounds. With only the weight of one rider, a dromedary can move at ten mph all day. Loaded down in caravan, they will move 30 miles per day. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, 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. Whenever possible, our books use RepKover?, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover's limit, perfect binding is used.

The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman, Jennifer Niederst, and Nancy Priest. Text was prepared by Erik Ray in SGML using the 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 gtroff -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.