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I like the children's illustrated guide concept (for adults). You definitely took it to an extreme here in terms of the characters and storyline. Assuming you aren't really trying to start a children's book series, I think if you toned down the cuteness just a little bit, you might have something interesting in explaining complex concepts.
As this is putatively a children's illustrated guide, I will allow myself to say that I do not trust that owl at all. I do not like that owl which put the innocent and helpless giraffe down in the cargo hold of its exceptionally dodgy ship and kept it locked down there with all the other animals and brainwashed it into thinking that it is happy. I do not like that owl that smiles a benevolent smile and laughs a hearty laugh without twitching the beak on its expressionless face. The one which is incredibly obviously a pirate because of its hat. That one.

That said, the pictures are very nicely drawn, I would encourage the author to illustrate his writings in the future.

Looks like the owl took the giraffe prisoner to conduct unethical experiments like cloning.
I read that as "conduct unethical experiments like coding."
Cloning, coding, eh. Much the same.
> dodgy

I really wish Americans said this word more frequently. It accurately describes so many things, it's a shame we don't.

I agree, but I think you have to admit the usual alternative "sketchy" is pretty expressive as well. :)
Please use JPGs that are not bigger than 50kB. More than 20 3MB images was about to eat my daily 3G data cap
Solving infra-structure problems by reeducating Producers and Consumers, are we?

Should send all those content-devs to labourcamps, one year for every full mb! ;)

Oops. Thanks for flagging that. Shrunk them.
Is that title a Diamond Age reference?
Pffft, dial up days are over. Thank you for using large images, looks great on high-dpi.
It's cute but does anyone else feel this helps perpetuate the man child stigma of our industry?
I think a bunch of 22 year-olds making $150K straight out of college does a bit more damage in that department than an illustrated Kubernetes guide.
I would pay good money to have complex topics like this presented in the illustrated child fable format. I can imagine learning a university level course on security/network/OSI model protocols (boring as F*) but presented in a human readable narrative with characters and story arcs. My brain would remember it so god damn well.
You'd like "The Manga Guide to Databases" :)

Read the reviews here https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahashi/...

Then buy it direct here https://www.nostarch.com/mg_databases.htm

YEah ! I love that book. I wish companies paid artists to collaborate with their technical writers to deliver engaging content tutorials in graphic novel format. I think in terms of memory stimulation --->

text + (color + emotion + narrative) > text

The Greeks could memorize incredibly long speeches because they set up such weird memorization queues with bizarre imagery/stories to trigger passages from one topic to the next. Narrative inside technical documentation could leverage this as well.

Never heard about that. Time to Google it:)
My professor taught locks and race conditions with a game of chopsticks in front of the class. It felt silly and childish at the start but I'll never forget it!
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby comes to mind...
Brett Victor's Aligator Eggs helped me to finally understand beta reduction in Lambda Calculus. http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/

Something about the colors and pictures clicked in my brain in a way that Greek letters did not.

How about the Manga Guide to Linear Algebra (https://www.nostarch.com/linearalgebra)?

If that's too adult, there's always the story of Ping: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q/ref=cm_cr_dp_ti...

Thanks for the links! Good to see such books aren't lost in total obscurity as I had suspected. Seems to me that "educational fiction" tended to be text-books poorly-disguised as stories, so I intend to do book for Physical Chemistry that flips it around: a story that happens to talk about the chemistry extensively (although, like most side projects, due to lack of funding/incentive that project is "taking it's own sweet time" going anywhere).
After reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud [1], I came to a similar realization, and wish he could provide the same depth and thoughtful illustration to many more subjects, especially technical or mathematical. Even if comics aren't your thing, I would _highly_ recommend this book. It's a fantastic lesson in communication and composition.

1: http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/

True, those are great illustrations.

Can anyone point me in the direction to get started with creating these kind of illustrations ?

Kudos to the author for making the images 3840x2560. Not only are they fantastic illustrations, they are somewhat future proof, as they will scale nicely on 4K+ resolution displays.
Looks like illustration 12 got replaced with a repeat of 10 at the end, the file is there and matches the text: https://deis.com/images/blog-images/kubernetes-illustrated-g...
Thanks for catching this. Fixed!
Typo in Kubernetes here:

"And other applications can find your service through Kurbenetes service discovery"

Edit: also "ephmeral" on the Volumes drawing.

Other typo: "who's knowledge is incomparable" should be "whose knowledge is incomparable."

Thanks for the guide; I enjoyed reading it.

I don't it's fixed, I find the last image to be the same as the 10th.
Kudos to Matt Butcher - The man always had a fantastic ability to distill information down to its most essential and consumable form.
Technical writing at its best. I wouldn't say the fate of the giraffe is something to envy. Just look at the final post-namespace picture.
Nice but wouldn't have hurt to throw in a simple little story, like "The Mange guide to Electricity". I already had a good understanding of electricity/electronics when I read that but the narrative created this fun refresher instead of the usual dry books you read on the subject.

The story helps me ground topics. It's weird but very effective. I highly recommend it if you are playing with Arduino/RASPI and want to go to that next level. Actually, I can't think of one subject that wouldn't be fun to learn with a Manga guide (they already have lots of them, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Physics).

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I kept waiting for Captain Kube to kill Phippy.
Haha. Yeah, the real story would probably be better told as a horror story...

Captain Kube captures Phippy and locks him in a dark container on his ship and forces him to perform repetitive work around the clock without any breaks - To make matters worse, Captain Kube begins carrying out highly hazardous experiments on Phippy which involves cloning him, messing with the clones and then mercilessly slaughtering them one by one in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and suffering.

I'm imagining netflix's chaos monkey as king kong boarding the ship and wreaking havoc on the boat and its crew.
I love this concept. Great work and it really helps make a complex topic understandable.
This is fantastic in terms of quality and in terms of being unique as a format for conveying complex technical info. Thanks!
Next: The Children's Illustrated Guide to Docker Networking.
i have never read something so entertaining and enlightening!! Thank you for that.
Thanks for this, I try to tell my fiance what I do at my job but she hasn't understood until now!
He meant to write "Dearest Father, whose knowledge is incomparable, what is Kubernetes?"