The best description of this book is probably the blurb on the back cover: "The Computer Book for the Inner Child". There was a time when computer programming was a joyous and fulfilling experience, back in the days of the Commodore 64 and early Amigas, when there was so much to learn, and each new issue of the popular computer magazines was like Christmas all over again. Today, there is too much to learn, we cannot begin to understand the interactions of all the drivers and DLL's and registry keys that power our machines. Programming today is wading through and working around all the incompatibilities and bugs of the monopolistic entity that has crushed all of the real innovation in the computer industry.
Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX takes on one of the Evil Empire's so-called "technologies": ActiveX, the technology formerly called COM, formerly called OLE, originally called DDE. (Never called Maurice, never sang of the Pompatous of Love.) We are guided through this quagmire with a fantasy story involving Mr. Bunny (a talking rabbit), and Farmer Jake (a talking farmer). To quote the blurb, "You will actually learn ActiveX by reading out loud to your children at bedtime!" Or maybe not.
Even before the book starts, there is a license agreement, End-Reader License Agreement ("ERLA") parodying the End-User License Agreement ("EULA") of Microsoft. Anyone who has suffered through the sometimes condescending tone of some documentation will appreciate the section on "How to Use This Book" which starts as follows:
Chapter 2, "The Underpinnings of ActiveX", after skewering C++ and COM (Common Object Model) contains a nifty description of the process of linking DLL's as a number of lawn gnomes linking hands that is actually not a bad analogy. Chapter 3, "Inside the Registry", is a merciless look at that radioactively decaying database known as the registry. Chapter 4, "Visual Basics", takes on Visual Basic 5.0 (the table of the Toolbar Icons is hilarious). Chapters 5, "ActiveX Controls", and 6, "Delivering the Goods", bring the story to a rollicking close.
Jokes abound all through the book, in numerous figures (even in the numbering of the figures!), in the Summary, Exercises and Additional reading at the end of each chapter, and even the Table of Contents and the Index have special gags.
I am eagerly looking forward to the other Mr. Bunny book, Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java.
web site: http://www.mrbunny.com
Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX
Carleton Egremont III
Addison Wesley Longman, Reading, MA, 1998
ISBN 0-201-48536-2
$14.95
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