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 Learning the bash Shell, Third Edition, is a silver bass, one of the 400-500 s\ pecies of sea bass. The silver bass, also known as the white perch, is found in freshwater bays and river mouths along the Atlantic coast of North America from Nova Scotia to South Carolina, and is most abundant in the Chesapeake region. Silver bass live in large schools and feed on small fishes and crustaceans. Although many bass never stray far from one place their whole lives, silver bass swim upstream to spawn, often becoming landlocked in the process. Like most bass, the s\ ilver bass is attracted to bright, shiny objects, and can be drawn quite close to swimmers and divers in this way.

Colleen Gorman was the production editor and copyeditor for Learning the bash Shell, Third Edition . MaryAnne Weeks Mayo, Lydia Onofrei, and Emily Quill provided quality control. Peter Ryan provided production assistance. Angela Howard wrote the index.

Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Karen Montgomery produced the cover layout with Adobe InDesign CS using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Judy Hoer 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 created by Chris Reilley and updated for the third edition by Robert Romano, Jessamyn Read, and Lesley Borash using Macromedia FreeHand MX and Adobe Photoshop CS. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.

The online edition of this book was created by the Digital Books production group (John Chodacki, Ken Douglass, and Ellie Cutler) using a set of Frame-to-XML conversion and cleanup tools written and maintained by Erik Ray, Benn Salter, John Chodacki, Ellie Cutler, and Jeff Liggett.