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. A moth is featured on the cover of Advanced Oracle PL /SQL: Programming with Packages. Moths, along with butterflies, make up the insect order Lepidoptera, the second largest order of insects. Their wings are largely or entirely covered in tiny, overlapping scales. Moths, unlike butterflies, are mostly nocturnal, yet they tend to fly toward light. An old superstition holds that white moths fluttering around lights in the evening are actually the souls of the recently dead.

The long coil seen on the head of the moth on this cover is the proboscis, a hollow tube through which it sucks up food. The proboscis is actually formed of two rounded tubes joined together by a third tube. When the moth is feeding blood flows through the two outer tubes, forcing the proboscis to straighten. When feeding is done the blood stops flowing to these tubes, allowing the proboscis to coil up and out of the way. All moths and butterflies have such a feeding "tube." Most moths feed exclusively on nectar, preferring flowers that are white or green and that can be seen at night. Their feeding activities make moths and butterflies extremely efficient pollenizers. Some moths, however, have developed proboscises that are strong enough to penetrate fruits. 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 the Nutshell Handbooks. The beasts themselves are adapted from 19th-century engravings 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 Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker 5.0 by Mike Sierra. 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.