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 UNIX for FORTRAN Programmers is a mammoth. The mammoth was any of the Pleistocene elephants which became extinct three to four thousand years ago. Mammoths first evolved about two million years ago and at their height ranged over Europe, Asia, North America, and North Africa. The largest of the mammoths was the Imperial mammoth of North America which stood 14-15 feet at the shoulder. The best known of the mammoths is the woolly mammoth of Eurasia and North America. In order to survive the arctic climate in which it lived, it developed a thick coat of hair and a layer of fat up to three and a half inches thick, which it used both for insulation and as a food reserve. Its large tusks curved back inward too far to be useful as weapons, but probably served well as shovels for digging through snow for food. Mammoths were hunted by early man for food for thousands of years. It has been hypothesised that overhunting may have been the cause of mammoth extinction.

UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks(R) help you tame them.

Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on other Nutshell Handbooks. The beasts themselves are adapted from 19th-century engravings from the Dover Pictorial Archive.

The text of this book is set in Times Roman; headings are Helvetica; examples are Courier. Text was prepared using SortQuadUs sqtroff text formatter. Figures are produced with a Macintosh. Printing is done on an Apple LaserWriter.