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 animals on the cover of Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 10g are cicadas. There are about 1,500 species of cicada. In general, cicadas are large insects with long thin wings that are perched above an inch-long abdomen. Their heads are also large and contain three eyes and a piercing and sucking mechanism with which to extrude sap from trees. Cicadas are known for their characteristic shrill buzz, which is actually the male's mating song, one of the loudest known insect noises.
Cicadas emerge from the ground in the spring or summer, molt, then shed their skin in the form of a shell. They stay near trees and plants, where they live for 4 to 6 weeks with the sole purpose of mating. The adult insects then die, and their young hatch and burrow into the ground. They attach to tree roots and feed off the sap for 4 to 17 years, after which time they emerge and continue the mating cycle. Cicadas have one of the longest life spans of any insect; the most common species is the periodical cicada, which lives underground for 13 to 17 years.
Reg Aubry was the production editor and proofreader for Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 10g. Genevieve d'Entremont, Marlowe Shaeffer, and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. John Bickelhaupt wrote the index.
Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is an original 19th-century engraving from Cuvier's Animals. The cover layout was produced by Emma Colby with QuarkXPress 4.1 using the 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 Nicole Arigo.
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.