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User Friendly: The Comic Strip |  | Author: Illiad
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
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Seller: green_earth_books
Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 1057859
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 132
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 8 x 0.4
ISBN: 1565926730
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9781565926738
ASIN: 1565926730
Publication Date: September 29, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Yes, it's a cliché, but it's true enough to be worth repeating: User Friendly is to the open-source world what Dilbert is to swarming hives of Windows cubicles. Set in an ISP company that keeps getting bought and sold, the constant remains a team of cynical, hilarious techies. M.B.A.s and marketers drift in and out, as do CEOs, often making statements like, "I can't surf the Web. I think the Internet is broken." For anyone who's dealt with similar situations, User Friendly is the ultimate in-joke. To be fair, the comic is pretty basic in layout and execution. No one will confuse this book with a graphic novel, since the visuals basically exist only to further the punch line. (Think of a stripped-down Bloom County and you're getting close.) Lots of the jokes involve goofy, clichéd rants about the beauty of Quake, Linux, and Star Wars--the holy trinity for a white, wired, 18-26 year-old male audience. But when the author, Illiad, nails the bloated bureaucracy that exists in the tech working world, it's a laugh-out-loud payoff. In one comic, a new "suit" walks into the tech den and asks, What's "one thing that makes your job difficult, and we'll see about eliminating that." The chorus erupts: "Meetings." The new boss replies: "Very good. Now let's spend a few hours discussing why meetings make you unproductive." A comic that tilts at windmills and Windows, it's clear why User Friendly has developed such a strong online cult following. --Jennifer Buckendorff
Product Description
User Friendly tells the story of Columbia Internet, "the friendliest, hardest-working, and most neurotic little Internet Service Provider in the world." Take three techs, two salespeople, a designer, two executives, a couple of administrative staff, mix in a mischievous Artificial Intelligence and a "dust puppy" born from the innards of a mega server, put them all together in a crowded little office, and you have the makings of one of the most off-beat, original, and funny comic strips to come along in years. User Friendly reads like Dilbert for the open-source community. Already in syndication in The National Post, one of Canada's two leading national newspapers, and with a massive online following, it provides outsiders a lighthearted look at the world of the hard-core geek, and allows those who make their living dwelling in this world a chance to laugh at themselves.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 34
 Great and True April 28, 2007
S. Ferguson (Grass Valley, CA USA)
The User Friendly comic strip is the greatest written about the Tech world. If you have at any time worked in IT, you will recognize the greatness of this strip. Having the strip in printed form is great, you don't need an Internet connection to read it again and again.
Timeless Humor.
An effective lampooning of the information technology culture October 27, 2006
Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States(cashbacher@yahoo.com))
As a computer science instructor and overall computer geek, I love humor that depicts us as challenged and challenging to work with. Information technology (IT) people are often cantankerous, extremely opinionated regarding the coolest technology and socially insensible. Those "charming" characteristics are effectively lampooned in the "User Friendly" comic strip and this collection highlights some of the best.
There is the sentient dust bunny, a Linux versus Windows controversy, clueless and sinister executives and people who would rather play "Quake" than perform any other human activity. In other words a microcosm of what goes on in the IT field at thousands of locations every day. Like so many others, I enjoy recognizing myself in these cartoons and recommend them to all other people who splash around in the IT pond.
For computer geeks only, but in that niche excellent October 2, 2005
M. Helmke
You have to be a computer geek to understand the humor. If you are, and especially if you have a unix/linux background and/or have worked with internet or other computer support you will find this one of the most hysterical comics around.
Best in Tech Geek Humour Possible August 11, 2005
J. Forbes (UK)
Really captures the spirit of the geek world and offers up some original and insightful humour ; other reviews say that it is just Mircrosoft hate propoganda but it is is well knows this strip is heavily read in the corridors of Redmond !! and it is all taken in the humourous sense in which it is meant
About 315 strips from 1998: Dilbert for techies May 19, 2005
Michele L. Worley (Kingdom of the Mouse, United States)
This collection suffers from occasional editing problems, such as uncorrected spelling errors and page layout issues, where a Sunday double strip appears just before a sequence it sets up (or just after some build-up *it* needed). Out of the 315 strips, naturally, 45 are Sunday doubles, which as time goes on include odd-sized single frame pieces, such as the techie nutrition pyramid (think salt and caffeine).
Since this is the first User Friendly collection, it presents the introduction of a number of the characters (and even Dust Puppy's dramatized account of Crud Puppy's origins, despite the fact that Crud Puppy's first appearance is covered earlier in the book).
The cast of characters are of the "names changed to protect the guilty" variety: the techies, suits, and non-human entities of the imaginary company Columbia Internet. Like Dilbert's take on corporate life, User Friendly will never run out of material as the techies face the ordeal of providing tech support to the clueless while not letting work interfere with their Quake tournaments.
User Friendly tends toward continuing stories that run for weeks rather than one-off jokes.
The cast includes:
- AJ (web design guy), who may not be recognizable until Illiad switches partway through the book to drawing him full-face rather than in profile
- the Dust Puppy, who plays a mean game of Quake with his feet
- Stef from marketing, who converts to playing Quake but resists being weaned off Windows onto Linux ("where are the themes?")
- Erwin the AI, who periodically is forced by circumstances to switch "bodies", including an iWhack, a Palm III, and the Mir space station. (He ought to quit provoking Stef, who retaliates with a baseball bat.)
- Greg, sent to Techie Detox after being caught playing Minesweeper too often (his appearance also changes)
- Pitr, the programmer from California who adopts a Slavic accent during an attempt to stop release of Windows 98 (he's been reading EVIL GENIUSES FOR DUMMIES and taken it to heart)
- the Crud Puppy, Dust Puppy's "evil twin" and nemesis, introduced when Stef spills office coffee on his keyboard. (Think Darth Vader voice, but with Microsoft programmer hands rather than feet). He terrorizes the world periodically until Pitr accidentally drinks him. Pitr's medical checkups restart the cycle.
- the Chief, who treats his "iron deficiency" at the golf course
- Miranda, introduced late in the book as the only female techie, and Pitr's ill-advised pranks on her
Techies and nutrition (well, caffeine and junk food) get a few dozen strips, including Mr. Cola, who appears to programmers staying up all night. He has many names, including the Espresso Monster. The computer geek nutrition pyramid may not be something you want to know about, or what happens when someone unexpectedly drinks Pitr's special coffee (it takes days to get the victim out of the ceiling crawlspace).
Microsoft is a favourite target, including their tribulations with the Department of Justice, security problems, aggressive marketing, everything. Microsoft products tend to make Erwin sick in their continuing "war against intelligence". Windows 2000 is a move "well-timed for Armageddon". (Y2K itself gets several references, but not nearly as many as over the following year's strips.)
The techies occasionally enjoy victory over the suits, such as the horrible consultant who is eventually billed by the Chief after identifying the customers as the techies' main problem. The book includes a six-week sequence of the Chief selling out to the bottomfeeders of iCan't internet. While he's treating his guilt with therapeutic golf, the techies face the horrors of a dress code and a requirement to migrate to NT. MS Black Ops is called in when they refuse, but what are the odds that MS' team has no trouble with their equipment?
Erwin, of course, is damaged by exposure to NT and forced into one of his periodic transfers to a new body (an iWhack, with a few weeks of jokes at Apple's expense before he's reinstalled on a Palm III, then on board MIR). Along the way, he shuts down iCan't's development by installing Quake on their system, thus distracting their techies. Between them the techies manage to drive iCan't internet away, and the Chief buys back Columbia for less than he sold it for - Stef having been in line for the top job.
The book concludes with a month-long parody of Star Wars IV: A New Hope as Dust Puppy tells Greg his version of how he and Crud Puppy came to be enemies. (The other techies are in hiding.) Crud Puppy has the Vader role, Microsoft is the Empire, and the Rebels have Linux. The penguin (in the robots' role) carries Microsoft's marketing plans and the source for Windows95.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 34
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