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 Apache Cookbook is a moose. The moose roams the forests of North America, Europe, and Russia. It's the largest of the deer family, and the largest moose of all, Alces alces gigas, is found throughout Alaska. This particular moose, in fact, is so ubiquitous that it's played an important role in the development of the state-though the relationship between moose and men is often adversarial.

Moose have a high reproductive potential and can quickly fill a range to capacity. And in Alaska, the removal of mature timber through logging and fire has benefited them by providing new stands of young timber-high-quality moose food. Moose get to be a pain when they eat crops, stand on airfields, wander the city streets, and collide with cars and trains.

But in general, these animals are good for the state's economy. Moose are an essential part of the Alaskan landscape, providing tourist photo opportunities when they feed along the highway. Residents and out-of-state hunters harvest 6,000 to 8,000 moose annually-approximately 3.5 million pounds of meat. The future for these animals in Alaska is reasonably bright because humans are learning how to manage moose habitat with wildlife and how to mitigate factors that affect moose populations, such as hunting and predation by wolves and bears.

Sarah Sherman was the production editor and copyeditor, and Marlowe Shaeffer was the proofreader for Apache Cookbook. Matt Hutchinson and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Julie Hawks wrote the index.

Emma Colby designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is an original engraving from The Illustrated Natural History: Mammalia. 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 Julie Hawks 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 Ed Stephenson.

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.