About the Cover Illustration

On the cover of Dependency Injection in .NET is “A woman from Vodnjan,” a small town in the interior of the peninsula of Istria in the Adriatic Sea, off Croatia. The illustration is taken from a reproduction of an album of Croatian traditional costumes from the mid-nineteenth century by Nikola Arsenovic, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2003. The illustrations were obtained from a helpful librarian at the Ethnographic Museum in Split, itself situated in the Roman core of the medieval center of the town: the ruins of Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace from around AD 304. The book includes finely colored illustrations of figures from different regions of Croatia, accompanied by descriptions of the costumes and of everyday life.

Vodnjan is a culturally and historically significant town, situated on a hilltop with a beautiful view of the Adriatic and known for its many churches and treasures of sacral art. The woman on the cover wears a long black linen skirt and a short black jacket over a white linen shirt. The jacket is trimmed with blue embroidery and a blue linen apron completes the costume. The woman is also wearing a large-brimmed black hat, a flowered scarf, and big hoop earrings. Her elegant costume indicates that she is an inhabitant of the town, rather than a village. Folk costumes in the surrounding countryside are more colorful, made of wool, and decorated with rich embroidery.

Dress codes and lifestyles have changed over the last 200 years, and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different continents, let alone of different hamlets or towns separated by only a few miles. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.

Manning celebrates the inventiveness and initiative of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago, brought back to life by illustrations from old books and collections like this one.