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 C++: The Core Language is a coatimundi, a South American mammal of the Procyonid family, a family that includes raccoons. For a time biologists believed coatimundis were two separate species, because the females live in groups, while the males live alone. The word coatimundi means "lone coati." Coatimundis are the only Procyonids that are active and social during the day. They take a communal break at about noon each day. While the adults nap, the younger animals play games, chasing each other up and down trees, until they're tired enough to nap also.

During mating season, in early spring, males are accepted into the clan, and mate with several females. After about a month the females chase the males away, but they are welcomed back for a brief period after the young are born. The father joins in the grooming of the young, and in this way is able to recognize his offspring and avoid preying on them later. After a gestation period of 74 to 77 days the young are born in platform nests built by the mother. The female and her young rejoin the clan after about five weeks.

Female coatis form what scientists call relations of "reciprocal altruism," or, more simply, friendship. They care for each others' young, and for each other. Coatis bring their young down from their nests six to ten weeks earlier than other Procyonids. They are able to do so because they have assistance searching for food and protecting the young.

The long snout of the coatimundi ends in a flexible, mobile nose that is used to sniff food out of small places. They are omnivores, subsisting mainly on invertebrates, frogs, lizards, small rodents, eggs, and fruit. Their enemies include large cats, boa constrictors, predatory birds, and humans. Coatimundis carry their tails straight up, except when threatened. UNIX and its atten dant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them.

Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font. The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman and Nancy Priest. Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA 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 SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 5.0 by Chris Reilley. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.