The authors wrote the text using NEdit and Vim. They typeset and indexed the text themselves, marking it up with a modified Lout syntax that they converted to pure Lout using a custom preprocessor written in Python. They produced all the diagrams in Lout and used ImageMagick to convert screenshots to PostScript. The monospaced font used for code is derived from Courier and was created using PfaEdit. The cover was provided by the publisher; the photograph is of the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989. The marked-up text was converted to PostScript by Lout, then to PDF by Ghostscript. The authors did all the editing and processing on Debian GNU/Linux systems under KDE. The example programs were tested on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.