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. --David Wall