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. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks(R) 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 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 SortQuad's sqtroff text formatter. Figures are produced with a Macintosh. Printing is done on a Tegra Varityper 5000.