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 animals featured on the cover of Applying RCS and SCCS are raccoons, mammals of the bear family. Raccoons are common throughout North America, and are also found in Central and South America. Their preferred habitat is forests or wooded areas near streams, ponds, lakes, or rivers. They use tree cavities, when available, for nesting, hiding, and wintering. The German word for raccoon, waschbar, means "washing bear," a name that comes from their habit of dipping their food in water before eating it. Berries, acorns, eggs, fish, reptiles, ducks, and muskrats are among the foods that make up a raccoon's diet.

In winter raccoons enter a deep sleep, but don't truly hibernate. Their body functions barely slow down, and during relatively warm periods they will leave their nests in search of food. When the temperature drops again, they head back to their shelters.

Raccoons are not communal animals. Males each have their own territory, which they mark with glandular secretions; they avoid the territory of others. In the North American raccoon the mating period is from January through April. The pair stays together for a only few days. The pregnant female builds a nest in an elevated place. After approximately 63 days of gestation, four to six young are born. The young are helpless and blind at birth, weighing about 2.5 ounces, with barely visible facial masks and tail rings. They are weaned at 16 weeks, but stay with their mothers for about one year.

Raccoons in the wild have a life expectancy of approximately five years. Their predators include coyotes, foxes, red lynxes, dogs, cougars, and humans. Although raccoons make very good pets, the relationship between humans and raccoons has never been an easy one. In 1990 approximately 4 million raccoons were killed worldwide for their fur. In parts of the United States coon hunting is an old tradition. For their part, raccoons are pests to corn fields and orchards, as well as to urban and suburban neighborhoods. They are also host to 13 diseases that are transmittable to humans, the most serious being rabies. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them.

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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, Jennifer Niederst and, 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 Gara mond 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.