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Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them.

The animal featured on the cover of Pthreads Programming is a silkworm. Silkworms produce silk when they secrete a fine, strong filament while spinning their cocoons. According to legend, the Empress Ling-chi discovered how to unwind the filament approximately 3000 years ago B.C., and thus produced the world’s first silk fabric. Silkworms survive exclusively on certain strains of mulberry leaves. The cultivated silkworm no longer exists in the wild. Although silkworms have been cultivated on a relatively small scale elsewhere, few places have both the warm climate and the abundance of mulberry trees that silkworms require, and so Asia, specifically China, continues to be the main producer of silk.

Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The image is 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 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 Edie Freedman, Jennifer Niederst, ...

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