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Comment by monksy | Hacker News Reader

Why?

I like the novelty of it. I have a copy of The Manga Guide to Databases at my desk that I occasionally 'lend out' to people that mess up my databases. It won't turn anyone into a db hero but it's a decent primer at least.

What the heck. I didn't know this was a thing. Thanks for the pointing it out.

Different strokes, I guess; I can't count the number of people that openly gush about _why's Ruby book with the cats or whatever, but to me it just read like the ravings of a highly functional something-opath. But reasonable people can disagree, and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for disagreeing with the hivemind.

I don't really get these weird ways of explaining different technologies, just give me a straightforward text description. But straightforward text isn't going anywhere and it doesn't hurt me if people want to read mangas about foxes or whatever.

To me, the attraction is less about the specific art used to communicate the concept, and more about the careful attention to a fully-formed analogy that explains the tech in completely different terms.

These kinds of explanations tend to focus on the most critical/important concepts, and help validate (or dispel) assumptions I've made about the tech.

This focus on analogy also lets the author tell the story faster, because I already understand:

- What an otter is

- That rivers flow

- The water flowing down a river that forks will be spread across those forks

- etc...

Depending on the strength of the analogy, it's possible to get the reader on the same page much faster than an intro/tutorial that must first explain foundational concepts just to get to the basics of the technology itself.

I've never really been a fan of analogies, because I feel like in the end I just need to first understand what the thing is underneath, so I can understand how the author has built their analogy... so the task of understanding why they used this analogy is equivalent to understanding the thing itself.

But I can't deny they are very popular!

Do people find these analogies helpful? The concepts aren't that difficult, the audience for them is already technical, and adding a cutesy abstraction about it makes it harder to understand.

The art and animation in this is great, but I feel like the author's talents are wasted on a document with no audience. Make a kids' book instead!

Yea that's where I was going with asking why. It feels like it's a trendy thing is to convert a technical thing into a children's book. (Which is odd.. children don't need that book.. so it's for an adult that wants to consume children's literature)

Note: I'm not against creative attempts to explain technical concepts. But the form to me seems odd, and that it feels like we're producing very short tutorials in a childrens format. That's even weirder.

My initial impression was "more of this garbage" - but it was really well done in the sense that it distilled the core functionality of the system in an easy-to-understand form.

The guy above you mentioned manga-guides to stuff, which utterly fail at their job, which again, is to distill key-information in an entertaining, easy-to-read, general (but fully accurate) manner.

I never found it helpful from a purely technical perspective, but I found it extremely eye-opening as an unorthodox approach to programming that really captured my imagination. It was definitely something that encouraged me to dig deeper into Ruby and do more explorative "creative" coding.

There's no shortage of dry technical documentation, so seeing something akin to outsider art in that space was really refreshing.

Personally I would love to see more technical books come with a soundtrack!

> ravings of a highly functional something-opath

I'm going to try and fit this into as many sentences as I can get away with!

Because to me it seems like a very pure way of separating a concept from implementation. In language and metaphors that are easy to understand and fun to read. I really like it. Now, in a very short time I can decide if Kafka can solve my problem or whether I should move on. I for one store information presented in this way much better, it's feasible that in 5 years I'm presented with a problem and the Otters pop into my mind.

Different people, different preferences I guess.

_why, that’s why.

caffeine gets it...

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