ISBN: 1-56592-861-X
Price: $12.95
Reader level: Any
Publication date: April 2000
The comic strip User Friendly (http://www.userfriendly.org), written by J.D. "Illiad" Frazer, has
quickly reached cult status amongst UNIX administrators,
programmers, and users. Why is this the case? Illiad has a knack
for depicting graphically what’s on everyone’s
mind—that the world of computers has gone completely to
hell.
What do I mean by that? Well, at some point in
the far distant past users and managers actually knew what
computers did, how they did it, and how to make them do it. But
now administrators, programmers, and power-users are relegated to
the "smart but odd" category as users and
"technology officers" decide to crash systems,
"upgrade" from UNIX to NT because Windows is built
around a GUI (and that’s what is important, right?), and do
other things that, well, frankly don’t deserve to be
mentioned.
So, into this crazy world of uncommon common
sense, powerless power-users, and maniacal management, Illiad
throws his irreverent, witty sense of humor. Just about everyone
is familiar with User Friendly, but oddly enough, many
people don’t realize that Illiad’s wonderful comic
strip has actually been published, and twice at that! Yes, you
can now read User Friendly offline in the luxury of your
home! (Yeah, I know, that’s where your "cool"
computer is, with your own private T3, with which you could
easily access www.userfriendly.org, but you
need the bandwidth for other things, right?)
O’Reilly has published Illiad’s User
Friendly as a handy paperback named, appropriately enough, Evil
Geniuses In A Nutshell, A User Friendly Guide to World Domination.
Ah, you say, a guide to "World Domination." Just what a
UNIX guru needs to read after a hard day in the trenches. (FYI, Evil
Geniuses comes on the tail of the very popular User
Friendly the Comic Strip, which was published in 1999, also
by O’Reilly.)
Evil Geniuses is, front-to-back, nothing
but delightful User Friendly comic strips. If the mere
thought of having offline access to User Friendly makes
your toes tingle (even if you won’t admit it), then you are
in for a treat. Illiad’s humor practically seeps through the
book as you move from page to page. (Well, except for Dust Bunny,
who is just plain odd.)
My suggestion is that if you enjoy sitting back
and reading about the silly things that probably happen to you at
work (such as your boss getting aggravated that you spend too
much time playing Quake, which is a right, not a privilege damn
it) then kick back, drink some Jolt cola, and pop open Evil
Geniuses for some personal time.
