ASP.NET in a Nutshell By G. Andrew Duthie, Matthew MacDonald
June 2002
Pages: 806

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 ASP.NET in a Nutshell is a stingray. The stingray is a flat, rectangular fish with no dorsal or anal fins that lives in shallow coastal areas around the world. It hides itself in the sandy or silty sea bottom while feeding on fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. The stingray is best known for its long tail, which holds a serrated spine near the tail base. When threatened, this spine injects a powerful, and often fatal, venom into its victim. The venom contains proteins that can slow an animal's respiration rate to dangerous levels. Humans are often surprised to learn, however, that the animal is normally gentle and nonaggressive.

Contrary to popular belief, stingrays usually sting humans only when stepped on by unsuspecting swimmers. When threatened in this manner, the animal reflexively whips its tail back to defend itself. This defense is effective against most animals, except for its main predator, the shark.

Populations living near stingrays have valued the animal for centuries-particularly in Polynesia, Malaysia, Central America, and Coastal Africa, where the stingray's spine was used to create spears, knives, and other tools. More recently, the stingray has become a popular tourist attraction; the stingray has been a major source of tourist income over the past decade in some island resorts in the Carribbean. Resorts in the Cayman Islands have taken special measures to educate humans about the stingray. Some resorts in this area even advertise beaches where tourists can swim and play with the animal. Ann Schirmer was the production editor and copyeditor for ASP.NET in a Nutshell. Claire Cloutier, Jane Ellin, and Colleen Gorman provided quality control. Phil Dangler provided production assistance. Joe Wizda wrote the index.

Emma Colby designed the cover of this book. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. The Intrinsic Class Reference was created by translating DocBook XML source into a set of gtroff macros using a Perl filter developed at O'Reilly by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU gtroff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to XML and implemented the book design. The GNU gtroff text formatter Version 1.11.1 was used to generate PostScript output. The rest of the book was converted into FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Ann Schirmer.

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