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 cover image of cowboys herding cattle is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Using their horsemanship and lariat skills, cowboys in the American West managed herds of several thousand cattle. These abilities would become especially valuable after the Civil War, when an increased demand for beef in the northern and eastern parts of the country left Texas ranchers needing a way to transport their product. Cowboys would drive Texas Longhorn cattle over 1,000 miles north to railroad cow towns in Kansas and Nebraska. These grueling journeys would take several months to complete, with those in charge of the herd working, eating, and sleeping on the open plain.

Adam Witwer was the production editor and copyeditor for High Performance Linux Clusters with OSCAR, Rocks, openMosix, and MPI. Leanne Soylemez was the proofreader. Claire Cloutier and Sanders Kleinfeld provided quality control. John Bickelhaupt wrote the index.

Emma Colby designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Hanna Dyer and Edie Freedman. Clay Fernald produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout. The chapter opening images are from Marvels of the New West: A Vivid Portrayal of the Stupendous Marvels in the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River, by William Thayer (The Henry Bill Publishing Co., 1888). This book was converted to FrameMaker 5.5.6 by Joe Wizda with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Adam Witwer.

The online edition of this book was created by the Safari production group (John Chodacki, Ken Douglass, and Ellie Cutler) using a set of Frame-to-XML conversion and cleanup tools written and maintained by Erik Ray, Benn Salter, John Chodacki, Ellie Cutler, and Jeff Liggett.