> As for the actual Ikea-style instruction pamphlet... I suspect that making it was very helpful for the author. But I don't think the result would have helped me as a novice.

I have no formal CS background or education at all, but have been working in IT for... over 20 years now?

So I'm not a "novice" in one sense, but in another my education on "algorithms" is pretty light and mostly through osmosis. Quicksort specifically is something where I've looked at the Wikipedia article on a number of times to understand but never managed to grasp.

The diagram made it click for me pretty much immediately. Yesterday if you asked me to implement a quicksort I wouldn't have had any idea where to begin, today I can say pretty confidently that I could implement something that would give you back a sorted list.

I'm probably an outlier here--minimal algorithms background, but an intuitive comfort with things like recursion--but at least some anecdotal evidence that it _may_ be useful to a novice!