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 UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 is a lion, a large, carnivorous cat inhabiting western India and Africa south of the Sahara. The most sociable of cats, lions live in prides consisting of one to four males and a collection of up to thirty females and cubs. However, the members of a pride are seldom all together at one time, instead moving about their territory as individuals or small groups. A pride's territory may be anywhere from 15 to 150 square miles, depending on the abundance of food, and is marked by scent and roaring.

Lions eat both fresh kill and carrion-dead animals or the kill of other animals. When they do kill, they show a preference for large prey such as zebra or wilde beest which will feed the entire pride. Females do the majority of the hunting, frequently working cooperatively to encircle or bring down large game. During the hunt, lions are careful to move under cover of darkness or foliage, but tend to disregard the wind direction and thus frequently give themselves away. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them. ... Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on Nutshell Handbooks, 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 Nancy Priest. Text was prepared by Erik Ray in SGML DocBook 2.4 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.