Re: the Hadoop comic
Maneesh's comic has been quite popular.
I've shown it to some people who didn't know about Hadoop before they read it, and the comic was quite effective at being teaching the topic. It would have been much more difficult to get them to learn about Hadoop, otherwise. :-)
Maybe all technical software products should ship with a comic. :-)
comic:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-zw6KHOtbT4MmRkZWJjYzEtYjI3Ni00NTFjLWE0OGItYTU5OGMxYjc0N2M1
Astonishingly good.
1. Easy to follow. Not full of technical terms, and avoids passive voice. Visual presentation actually holds interest, unlike most PowerPoint presentations (yawwwn).
2. Carefully omits difficult points, at least until later.
3. Does not require highly skilled artist for creation. More like "Scott Adams" rather than "Hal Foster" but even Scott's style is beyond what is needed.
A few years ago the person named _why (or "why the lucky stiff") created comics for teaching Ruby. _why and his work was decidedly weird, but popular. Then one fine day (19 August 2009) he vanished. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff
Gene Kim-Eng's comment (just received as I write this) suggests that this kind of style may not last more than one generation of documents. That's likely the case, especially if docs are eventually required to match a style specification. Comics are insufficiently vanilla.
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the Hadoop comic: From: Lee Fisher
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