JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

By David Flanagan

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

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Colophon

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 on the cover of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is a Javan rhinoceros. All five species of rhinoceros are distinguished by their large size, thick, armor-like skin, three-toed feet, and single or double snout horn. The Javan rhinoceros, along with the Sumatran rhinoceros, is one of two forest-dwelling species. The Javan rhinoceros is similar in appearance to the Indian rhinoceros, but smaller and with certain distinguishing characteristics, primarily skin texture. Rhinoceroses are often depicted standing up to their snouts in water or mud. In fact, they can frequently be found just like that. When not resting in a river, rhinos will dig deep pits in which to wallow. Both of these resting places provide a couple of advantages. First, they give the animal relief from the tropical heat and protection from blood-sucking flies. (The mud that the wallow leaves on the skin of the rhinoceros provides some protection from flies, also.) Second, mud wallows and river water help support the considerable weight of these huge animals, thereby relieving the strain on their legs and back. Folklore has long held that the horn of the rhinoceros possesses magical and aphrodisiacal powers, and that humans who gain possession of the horns will gain those powers, also. This is one of the reasons why rhinoceroses are a prime target of poachers. All species of rhinoceros are in danger, and the Javan rhino is the most precarious. There are fewer than 100 of these animals still living. At one time Javan rhinoceroses could be found throughout southeastern Asia, but they are now believed to exist only in Indonesia and Vietnam. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced by Kathleen Wilson with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font. Whenever possible, our books use RepKoverTM, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover's limit, perfect binding isused. The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and Mary Jane Walsh. Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the constant-width font used in this book is Letter Gothic. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 5.0 by Chris Reilley.

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