Punctuation

I'm sure most of you have heard of the book Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which is all about punctuation. It's really pretty informative and entertaining at the same time, which is not something I expected from a grammar book. I read it about a week ago, and was struck by the amount of British examples... which of course makes sense, as Truss is British and would approach punctuation from a British view.

There were a few times, okay, there were many, in which she made a lot of statements I didn't agree with, then at the end of several pages wrote, "Of course, if you are in America, _____." Which, perhaps, struck me even more. It wasn't that she was incorrect, we actually have different rules of punctuation. Different spellings I can understand in a way, but the placement of punctuation?

I can't expound upon the differences here, but I do wonder what the American English versions of the book--if such exists--do about those things.

I also learned that we call punctuation marks by different names. Why? Beyond me. Still the comma , the semi-colon ; and the colon : but the rest...

British - Symbol - American
-full stop . period
-query ? question mark ---okay, so they use "question mark" too, but also "query"
-bracket ( ) parenthesis
-square bracket [ ] bracket
- that funny bracket { } has different names but I forget what they are
-inverted commas ' ' used for most speech
- " " not always called quotation marks
-stroke / slash ---this one is my favorite. Is the \ backstroke?