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 birds featured on the cover of Mastering Regular Expressions are owls. There are two families and approximately 180 species of these birds of prey distributed throughout the world, with the exception of Antarctica. Owls are physically characterized by their large heads, flats faces, large, forward-facing eyes, hooked beaks, and sharp claws. Most, although not all, species of owl are nocturnal hunters, feeding entirely on live animals, ranging in size from insects to hares. Because they have little ability to move their large, forward-facing eyes, owls must move their entire heads in order to look around. They can rotate their heads up to 270 degrees, and some can turn their heads completely upside down. Owls ears are highly sensitive to the frequency and direction of sounds. Many species of owl have asymmetrical ear placement, which enable them to more easily locate their prey in dim or dark light. Owl feathers are soft, allowing them to fly noiselessly and thus to surprise their prey. Because their large eyes give them the appearance of intellectual depth, owls have been portrayed in folklore through the ages as wise creatures. Because of this, they are viewed by humans differently than most birds of prey, which are considered, in an anthropomorphic way, to be evil and cold-blooded. 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 Mary Jane Walsh. The text was prepared by Jeffrey Friedl in a hybrid markup of his own design, mixing SGML, raw troff, raw PostScript, and his own markup. A home-grown filter translated the latter to the other, lower-level markups, the result of which was processed by a locally-modified version of O'Reilly's SGML tools (this step requiring upwards of an hour of raw processing time, and over 75 megabytes of process space, just for Chapter 7!). That result was then processed by a locally-modified version of James Clark's gtroff, producing camera-ready PostScript for O'Reilly.

The text was written and processed on an IBM ThinkPad 755 CX, provided by Omron Corporation, running Linux the X Windows System, and Mule (Multilingual Emacs). A notoriously poor speller, Jeffrey made heavy use of ispell and its Emacs interface. For imaging during development, Jeffrey used Ghostscript (from Aladdin Enterprises, Menlo Park, California), as well as an Apple Color Laser Writer 12/600PS provided by Omron. Test prints at 1270dpi were kindly provided by Ken Lunde, of Adobe Systems, using a Linotronic L300-J.

Ken Lunde also provided a number of special font and typesetting needs, including custom-designed characters and Japanese characters from Adobe Systems's Heisei Mincho W3 typeface.

The figures were originally created by Jeffrey using xfig, as well as Thomas Williams's and Colin Kelley's gnuplot. They were then greatly enhanced by Chris Reilley using Macromedia Freehand.

The text is set in ITC Garamond Light; code is set in ConstantWillison; figure labels are in Helvetica Black.