1. A book published by O'Reilly Publishing (OreillyAndAssociates, http://www.oreilly.com) which has an artful drawing of an animal on the cover.
	1. Any book published by O'Reilly Publishing.
This is quite a good idea. It gives their line of books a uniform appearance while still giving each book an individual identity, with the CamelBook as the prime example. Similar is WroxPress using photos of authors on the covers.
O'Reilly has posted a few essays about their use of animals on book covers: http://web.archive.org/web/20090226012506/http://letters.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/letters/2003/animal_index_0203.html Date: February 2003
http://web.archive.org/web/20130405001127im_/http://oreilly.com/images/people/lorrie_animals.jpg
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http://akamaicovers.oreilly.com/images/0636920028154/lrg.jpg

Don't you love the way they had a perfectly good animal given the title of this book, but completely disregarded it?

''There is a reason: http://www.rmi.net/~lutz/lp-cover-post.html Wood rats '''must''' learn about Pythons!''

''Alternatively, maybe this is why:''

http://akamaicovers.oreilly.com/images/9780596158118/lrg.jpg

The "Learning" books often have smaller, cuter animals than other books. Compare

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/covers/learnjava2.s.gif with
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/covers/javanut4.s.gif and
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/covers/jfcnut.s.gif

I'm not sure there's such a thing as a cute python, but a cute rodent is easy.

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CategoryJargon CategoryBook