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 animals featured on the cover of Virtual Private Networks are puffins. Puffins are small, unusual-looking birds with large triangular bills, short necks, and stocky bodies. They live in colonies, sometimes tens of thousands of birds together, along the icy shores of the northern regions of the globe. Though rarely seen outside of the northern regions, there are approximately 15 million puffins in the world today. Despite their short wings, puffins can fly, although they spend most of their time swimming or walking erect on land. While flying, they make a purring sound.

Here's some more puffin stuff: puffins' primary food sources are small fish and marine animals. They dive for fish and use their wings to swim underwater to catch them. They can carry as many as 30 fish in their mouth at one time, to bring back to shore for their young. Puffin pairs often mate for life. Usually one egg is laid per pair, and both mother and father incubate the egg and feed the young hatchling. 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 Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker 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 7.0, and screen shots were created in Adobe Photoshop 4.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.