Colophon


Colophon

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 SQL Tuning is a salamander. Though mature salamanders bear a superficial resemblance to small lizards, salamanders are not reptiles ; rather, they are amphibians that retain their tails as adults. Like all amphibians, a salamander begins life underwater as a gelatinous egg and develops through a series of stages. Newly hatched salamander larvae resemble tadpoles (the larval form of toads and frogs) and breathe through gills. As they mature, salamanders develop legs and lungs, which allow them to leave the water and breathe air. But they remain in or around streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, or moist woodlands throughout their lives. They must return to a freshwater source to lay their eggs.

The most immediately recognizable difference between adult salamanders and lizards is the former's lack of scales ; a salamander's skin is smooth and porous and is used to absorb moisture. Salamanders' skin can be any of a variety of colors - from brown or black to yellow or red - and is often covered with dark spots, bars, or stripes . As they grow, salamanders molt their skin, usually every few days or every few weeks. Salamanders also have the ability to shed and regrow their tails and other parts of their body that become severed or damaged. Unlike other amphibians, salamanders are carnivorous at every stage of their life cycle (tadpoles are herbivorous), and their diet consists of worms, insects , snails, and small fish.

Mature salamanders are usually about 4 to 8 inches long, though they can be as short as 2 inches and as long as 70 inches. Most have four legs, though some have only two forelegs. Their front feet each have four clawless toes, while hind feet, when present, have five toes. Salamanders are nocturnal and usually divide their time between the land and water, though some live exclusively in the water and a few are purely land-dwelling. When they swim, they make little use of their limbs . Instead, they use their laterally compressed (i.e., taller than it is wide) tail and muscle contraction to propel themselves through the water, as eels do. Some tree- dwelling salamanders have prehensile tails, which they can use to grasp branches.

The name salamander (from the Greek salamandra ) originally applied to a legendary creature that could live in and extinguish fire. Aristotle is largely responsible for perpetuating this myth; in his History of Animals , he supports the story that the salamander "not only walks through the fire but puts it out in doing so." The application of the name salamander to an actual amphibian was first recorded in 1611, at which time the supernatural characteristics of the mythological animal became attributed to the actual animal. The common belief (mistaken, of course) that salamanders can endure fire persisted well into the 19th century.

Brian Sawyer was the production editor and copyeditor for SQL Tuning . Matt Hutchinson was the proofreader. Darren Kelly and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Angela Howard 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.

Melanie Wang designed the interior layout, based on a series design by David Futato. 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 Brian Sawyer.

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.



SQL Tuning
SQL Tuning
ISBN: 0596005733
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 110
Authors: Dan Tow

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