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 Programming .NET Security is a Smoothhound shark. The Smoothhound shark is a harmless bottom-dwelling reef shark, which is also known as a mud shark or dogfish. It is a moderately sized shark with two high dorsal fins and short blunt teeth. It also has small grinding plates, which are used to crush shellfish. Besides shellfish, the Smoothhound shark forages reefs for worms, octopuses, and small fish.

The Smoothhound shark can be found in both inshore and offshore habitats, often over tidal flats and in shallow bays. Also, the Smoothhound shark is viviporous, which means it gives birth to live young; inside the female body, pups hatch from eggs and remain there until they are fully developed.

Sarah Sherman was the production editor and copyeditor, and Matt Hutchinson was the proofreader for Programming .NET Security. Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Johnna VanHoose Dinse and Tom Dinse wrote the index.

Ellie Volckhausen 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.

David Futato designed the interior layout. 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. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Sarah Sherman.

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.