> I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. The editing team have no say in which animal goes with which book. Aparently there's a team somewhere in O'Reilly whose job is to make the Animal selection. It'll be determined close to release date - some time next year.
15 years of wondering answered in a single blog post.
This is how it works currently due to the volume of manuscripts they are working on at any given time.
My editor told me that you used to be able to ask or try to make a case for a specific animal.
If you are writing a book about something that has an official animal or something, I am sure you can have some sway, but for the long tail of titles, you get one assigned randomly at some point.
If you are planning to publish a book, they are great to work with since they work with more engineer authors than other publishers may have experience with. A big part of it are the editors you work with there.
Wouldn't that potentially be a copyright violation? E.g. using elephant for PHP could be seen as trying to copy PHP's logo? [1] (Not a lawyer, this is just a question)
[1] This is likely a terrible example, as I don't think elephant is PHP's official logo, just an associated mascot like Java's Duke? Still... I don't know if this can be copyrighted.
And assuming PHP trademarked it's elephant, it has to be THE PHP elephant to be a violation, not an O'Reilly drawing elephant. Duke is a bad example, too because there's not real Duke to make a drawing of.