Book details of 'Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex'

Title	Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex
Author(s)	Carlton, III Egremont
ISBN	0201485362
Language	English
Published	July 1998
Publisher	Addison-Wesley Professional

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Surely, our society must have passed some technological milestone in order for component software to merit a comic novella. Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX attempts to enlighten the reader about Microsoft's distributed-computing solution without actually explaining the technology, as more gauche programming books frequently do. This book is funny! To wit (so to speak), an excerpt: In Visual Basic, you form windows using forms. A form is a window that you form. At first forms are unformed. You must form your forms using the form designer (formerly the former). In the form former, an unformed form forms a uniform formation.... You get the idea. This book is a hoot and a half. The basic idea is that a smarty-pants bespectacled rabbit and a hick farmer travel around together, having metaphorical experiences that (more or less) help explain how ActiveX works. Hey, Mr. Bunny makes about as much sense as any other approach to COM documentation, and he's a lot less pretentious. Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX will appeal to people who already have a pretty good grasp of what Microsoft's component architecture is all about--and who have realized it's a complicated morass worth a laugh or two.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Publishers, of course, publish a lot of books, knowing that even if they ("they" being the publishers in question) don't like the book, very possibly somebody will. (Addison-Wesley does less of this than some others I could name.) You have to wonder, though, if every once in a while they are just a tad embarrassed by what they have produced. You particularly have to wonder when you notice that the normal AW logo doesn't appear on the spine, and the book cover states boldly that the book has been printed by "Some company in Reading, Massachusetts." (Even the cover letter from the marketing department is printed on plain paper instead of corporate letterhead. For an old professional paranoid, this is enough to send my neuroses into high gear.) It is obvious that all children should be familiar with the concepts of DCOM (the Distributed Common Object Model) before they are able to read. (Microsoft paid me to say that, of course, since while it is obvious from a monopolistic perspective why ActiveX is going to be around for a long time to come, nobody I know has been able to come up with any technical reason why it should rate more than two minutes of consideration in comparison to any of the competing technologies in the same field.) Therefore a bedtime story about ActiveX is long overdue. (It's probably Mr. Bunny's field.) On the other hand, most books about ActiveX are enough to put anyone to sleep. (Unless it's Farmer Jake's field.) The author knows more about computers than his friends give him credit for. Indeed, if you aren't up on computers, programming, and computer industry infighting you are not going to get the best jokes. (People who don't know anything about computers will find the book silly, at best.) What the author very obviously does know, however, is technical literature. Yes, I have reviewed books with tables of contents just as detailed, and just as useless. Yes, I have reviewed books with indices almost as pointless. Yes, I've reviewed books with cute little gimmicks that take over from the information. No, I haven't reviewed the book with the bunny on the cover (I think I got impatient and sent it off to the library). Yes, I've reviewed books that never explain, but only assert. Hey, this is a book reviewer's kind of book. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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