Oracle Essentials, 5th Edition

Colophon

The animals on the cover of Oracle Essentials, Fifth Edition are cicadas. There are about 1,500 species of cicada. In general, cicadas are large insects with long thin wings that are perched above an inch-long abdomen. Their heads are also large and contain three eyes and a piercing and sucking mechanism with which to extrude sap from trees. Cicadas are known for their characteristic shrill buzz, which is actually the male’s mating song, one of the loudest known insect noises.

Cicadas emerge from the ground in the spring or summer, molt, then shed their skin in the form of a shell. They stay near trees and plants, where they live for four to six weeks with the sole purpose of mating. The adult insects then die, and their young hatch and burrow into the ground. They attach to tree roots and feed off the sap for 4 to 17 years, after which time they emerge and continue the mating cycle. Cicadas have one of the longest life spans of any insect; the most common species is the periodical cicada, which lives underground for 13 to 17 years.

The cover image is an original 19th-century engraving from Cuvier’s Animals. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Adobe Minion Pro; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu Mono.