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 Learning XML is a hatching chick. Chickens have been around for at least 3,000 years. A hen typically lays one egg at a time and will sit on the egg, keeping it warm, until it hatches. The incubation period for a chicken egg is approximately 21 days from fertilization to hatching. Before hatching, the chick absorbs the egg yolk, which can sustain it for the first three days of its life. The most popular laying chicken in North America is the leghorn, which can produce eggs from five months of age until about a year and a half. Colleen Gorman was the production editor, and Emily Quill was the copyeditor for Learning XML. Madeleine Newell and Ellie Cutler provided quality control. Linley Dolby, Matt Hutchinson, Molly Shangraw, and Rachel Wheeler provided production support. Ellen Troutman-Zaig 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 QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. The print version of this book was created by translating the DocBook XML markup of its source files into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at O'Reilly & Associates 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 XML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter Version 1.11.1 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano using Macromedia FreeHand 8 and Adobe Photoshop 5. This colophon was written by Nicole Arigo.