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 Win32 Multithreaded Programming is a Portuguese man-o'-war (genus Physalia). This colonial warm-water creature is found across the globe, but is most common in tropical regions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as well as the Gulf Stream of the northern Atlantic. The Portuguese man-o'-war consists of a group of polyps, individual unisexual organisms with specific cooperative functions. The body is formed of a bladder like, gas-filled sack ranging from 9-30 centimeters long, which may extend up to 15 centimeters above the water. This sack is tinted blue, pink, or violet, and is filled with a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. The crest of the body serves the man-o'-war as a sail, as they have no active means of transport; sometimes as much as a thousand of the colonies are carried together by gusts of wind. Like its namesake, the Portuguese man-o'-war carries a formidable weapon. Beneath its body hang tentacles of up to 50 meters in length, containing stinging cells called nematocysts that paralyze small prey, which is then digested. Though the man-o'-war does not attack humans, victims frequently swim into the tentacles or touch them on the shore, where the toxin remains active. The sting can cause severe pain, fever, nausea, respiratory and heart weakness, and welts on the skin, but deaths are rare. A species of fish, somewhat resistant to the poison, often lives amongst and feeds on the Portuguese man-o'-war's tentacles, but is still occasionally paralyzed and eaten. 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. Whenever possible, our books use Rep KoverTM, 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 Edie Freedman and 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 7.0 by Robert Romano. The CD label was designed by Hanna Dyer. This colophon was written by Nancy Wolfe Kotary.