Furu Anime Panikku

This was published not too long ago, just last December. At first, I thought this would be one of those character guide books for a manga series, just like any other, but it was totally the opposite. This is one of those instances where manga is educational.

For any IT student, you would know the stuff covered in this book as it’s around the elementary level. The book is split into 5 chapters, each with various “hackings”. Don’t expect to hack anything after reading this. I can’t even do much after 3 years in an IT security course, so you really should expect much from a single volume of manga. However, it does serve well as a channel to educate the less IT savvy people about some basic matters regarding IT.

Some entry-level stuff regarding various OSes such as Windows, *NIX and even the recent Chrome OS, an introduction to BASIC and batch files, binary and hexadecimal, and IP addresses are some of the areas covered. If you can understand Japanese, you should be able to make sense of it rather easily. While I was reading through, I was reminded at how this was quite similar to bits and pieces of some of the textbooks I used to have when I was a first year student.

While any IT savvy person would laugh at how elementary the topics are, I find that this is actually a great way to enlighten some of the younger ones, as well as the ones who only use the computer for basic functions such as Internet surfing and document processing. Besides the content, there are excerpts of various scenes in the manga included according to the topic at hand. This does help ease the dryness and boredom.

For me, while I’ve learned much of the stuff in this manga some time back, it was interesting going through what I’ve learned in Japanese. Most of the terms are in katakana, so it should be too difficult to understand even if you’ve just began Japanese.

If you love Bloody Monday, but haven’t got much of the technical terms mentioned in the series, I would recommend this book. In fact, if there was slightly more in depth content added and a few more chapters, this could easily be a elementary-level textbook which could be used in “Introduction to IT” kind of modules. A textbook which you won’t be doodling on, not with all the manga drawings.

On a remotely related note, I saw this at Kinokuniya.