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 Windows NT User Administration is an octopus, an eight-legged cephalopod mollusk most closely related to the nautilus, squid, and cuttlefish. The common octopus is about 2-3 feet long. Its brain is the most complex of the invertebrates', with long- and short-term memories, providing it with the ability to solve problems by trial-and-error methods-a trick that comes in handy when evading or robbing fishermen's traps. An octopus also has complex eyes, with vision approximately as acute as a human's. Their suckers' touch is very sensitive.

One of the octopus's defense mechanisms is the release of a purple-black ink cloud as smoke screen or decoy. They can also change color for camouflage (as well as to reflect mood change) and dart away by jetting water through their siphon. This ability keeps the octopus from being an easy target, though they have no exterior hard shell. This lack of solid body matter also allows octopuses to squeeze into very small spaces.

The male octopus usually dies soon after mating; the female usually dies soon after laying a large number of eggs and caring for them until they hatch. Only a few young out of what may be more than 200,000 eggs will survive to adulthood. The lifespan of an octopus is short, ranging from 6 months to 3 years, depending on species and water temperature. ... 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.

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 Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and Macromedia FreeHand 7.0 by Robert Romano. Whenever possible, our books use a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds the limit for this type of binding, perfect binding is used. .