About the cover
The cover shows a penguin asleep in the snow. Its dream is visible through the open end of a steel pipe: a sunny hill, a desktop computer that runs Linux, and the years 1999, 2009 and 2019 struck out. Beside the sleeper a dumpster labelled teraSlop is on fire, and a crab toasts a marshmallow over it.
Each chapter opens with a different animal at work on the chapter’s subject.
| Chapter | Character | Scene |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flange the penguin | a pipe that carries the bytes of hello to a waiting gopher, in order |
| 2 | Docket the gopher | a wall of numbered pigeonholes, and a string from hole 3 to a filing cabinet |
| 3 | Fork the daemon | a small red daemon with a fork, and a smaller copy of itself numbered 501 |
| 4 | Conch the hermit crab | a crab that lives in a shell, at a terminal that shows a pipeline |
| 5 | Klaxon the owl | a bell, signal flags numbered 2, 9 and 15, and a hare startled awake |
| 6 | Tick the gnu | a referee with a stopwatch, a hare and a tortoise, and the numbers on their bibs |
| 7 | Atlas the elephant | a map of numbered pages, mostly blank, with a square being drawn |
| 8 | Stash the squirrel | a shelf of recently read pages within reach, and the full store in a distant tree |
| 9 | Relay the octopus | a switchboard with 2 lamps lit, and an arm on each |
| 10 | Halyard and Cleat the pigeons | 2 carrier pigeons, and numbered notes on the line between them |
| 11 | The box cats | 3 cats in 3 boxes, each box marked number 1, and an owl that sees all 3 |
| 12 | Weir the beaver | a dam with a mark, and water standing exactly at the mark |
| 13 | Moby and the crew | a whale carrying containers, with a penguin, a gopher and a crab on top |
The gopher and the crab appear because the programs of the book are written in Go and
in Rust. The plates are drawn by tools/art.py.