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 Learning the UNIX Operating System is the horned owl. The horned owl is the most powerful of the North American owls, measuring from 18 to 25 inches long. This nocturnal bird of prey feeds exclusively on animals--primarily rabbits, rodents, and birds, including other owls--which it locates by sound rather than sight, its night vision being little better than ours. To aid in its hunting, an owl has very soft feathers which muffle the sound of its motion, making it virtually silent in flight. A tree-dwelling bird, it generally chooses to inhabit the old nests of other large birds such as hawks and crows rather than build its own nest. 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. The text pages are formatted in troff. Figures were created by Chris Reilley in Aldus Freehand. The cover was produced in QuarkXPress.