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 TCP/IP Network Administration is a land crab. Land crabs are found in tropical America, West Africa, and the Indo-Pacific region where they can be found living in burrows in fields, swamps, and mangrove thickets. They occasionally are found as far as 5 miles inland, returning to the sea to spawn. Land crabs are a subgroup of over 4,500 species of crabs. Classified with shrimp, lobster, and crayfish, crab differ from these in their tail structure. Unlike the rest of their order, crabs' tails are curled under their thorax. In addition, their carapace tend to be unusually broad. Though land crabs in the United States commonly grow to weigh no more than 18 ounces and measure 4 or 5 inches across, crabs in general range in size from less than a centimeter across to the largest, the Japanese spider crab, whose claws can span 12 feet. 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 Garamond, Garamond Book, and Courier. The text pages are formatted in troff. Figures were created by Chris Reilley in Aldus Freehand. The cover was produced in QuarkXPress.