Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The bird on the cover of ADO: ActiveX Data Objects is an ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). Considered extinct by many naturalists and ornithologists (the last confirmed sighting was in the 1950s), the "ivory-bill" was never abundant in its habitat, the southeastern United States and Cuba. With glossy black plumage, white markings, and a red tufted crest (males only), the ivory-bill looks extremely similar to the pileated woodpecker, with whom it also shared its habitat. The similarities between the two birds has been the cause of much trouble, as eager amateurs add to unconfirmed sighting reports of the ivory-bill when they have probably spotted the pileated woodpecker. This is especially troublesome for naturalists who hold out hope that the ivory-bill may still exist in the far reaches of Louisiana forests or in Cuba. In the early 1990s, many nature and birding groups spent considerable amounts of money mounting search efforts for the ivory-bill.

As do all woodpeckers, the ivory-bill has a chisel-like bill and a long, hard-tipped, sticky tongue; the first for drilling and scaling bark, the latter for retrieving beetles and grubs on which to feed. Retrieving food in this manner, however, is not what creates the drumming sound that many associate with woodpeckers. Rather, woodpeckers drum when reinforcing their claim to a territory, creating the loudest drum possible by striking the tops of dead, hollow trees.

Important differences between the closely linked ivory-billed and pileated woodpeckers include their bills (the ivory-bill's was, well, ivory, while the pileated woodpecker's bill is gray), their sizes (the ivory-bill was the largest of all North American woodpeckers), and their calls (the ivory-bill's was a "toot"; the pileated's is a "kuk"). In 1987, Dr. Jerome A. Jackson of Florida Gulf University caught the ivory-bill's distinctive call on eighteen minutes of tape in Louisiana, adding to the excitement created by various unconfirmed sightings. The most recent and credible sighting occurred in 1999, when graduate student David Kulivan sighted a pair of what were supposedly ivory-bills in southeastern Louisiana.

While The Nature Conservancy declared the ivory-bill extinct in 1994, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not yet added it to its extinction list. The reason for its near or possible extinction: logging of the old-growth forests in which it lived. Jeffrey Holcomb and Sarah Jane Shangraw were the production editors for ADO: ActiveX Data Objects. Jeffrey Holcomb copyedited the text. Linley Dolby, Matt Hutchinson, and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Pamela Murray, Sarah Jane Shangraw, and Joe Wizda wrote the index. Sarah Jane Shangraw did page composition.

Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Erica Corwell produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

Melanie Wang designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. Anne-Marie Vaduva converted the files from Microsoft Word to FrameMaker 5.5.6 using tools created by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Jeffrey Holcomb.