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 appearing on the cover of Windows NT Backup & Restore is a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). Hyenas live in flat, grassy plains of sub-Saharan Africa. An average adult female hyena weighs about 140 pounds and stands several feet high; the male is smaller and shorter. Females are also more aggressive than males. In other respects, it is not easy to distinguish between the sexes. This difficulty, along with the hyena's status as indiscriminate scavenger, has inspired much folklore about hyenas, frequently associating them with witches.

Though they have a dog-like appearance, hyenas are more closely related to cats than dogs, and their nearest relations are the mongoose and meerkat. Spotted hyenas are carnivorous, acting as predator or scavenger, eating every bone and shred of remains with their remarkably strong jaws. Hyena cubs fight viciously among themselves, significantly reducing the eventual adult population.

Hyenas live in loosely grouped matriarchal clans of up to 100 members. Most hunting is solitary, though groups do occasionally hunt together, relying on numbers and stamina. Spotted hyenas are social and vociferous animals with several distinct means of communication, including the notorious giggling laugh, which indicates not humor but fear or excitement when under attack. 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 3.32 using the ITC Garamond font. Whenever possible, our books use RepKover™?, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover™'s limit, perfect binding is used.

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 Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 4.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Nancy Kotary.