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 JavaT Web Services in a Nutshell is a European ibex. The animal, which is also known as the Alpine ibex, is a medium-sized mountain goat that can grow to 70 inches as an adult. It has very muscular legs, which allow it to move easily about the mountains in which it lives. Its coat is brown; it is a darker shade of brown in the winter months, but the color becomes lighter during the summer. The major defining characteristic of the ibex is its long horns, which grow up and then curl back slightly. The male horns, which are typically about 40 inches in length, are much longer than the female horns, which are only about 14 inches in length. The ibex eats mostly greens such as grass and plant leaves. The European ibex primarily lives in the Alps; over the spring and summer, it continuously moves up to higher altitudes, looking for more grazing land. Females and males do not interact except during mating season.

Mary Brady was the production editor and the copyeditor for JavaT Web Services in a Nutshell. Genevieve d'Entremont was the proofreader. Colleen Gorman and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Derek Di Matteo, Darren Kelly, Linley Dolby, and Reg Aubry provided production support. Julie Hawks wrote the index.

Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. 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.

Ellie Volckhausen and David Futato designed the interior layout, based on a series design by David Futato. This book was converted by Andrew Savikas to 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 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 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Mary Brady.

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