Review: Hackett and Bankwell Issue #1

I was lucky to have received my copy of Hackett and Bankwell Issue 1 this week. (Thanks so much to Intarcorp who sent me a copy!) I saw that there’s a huge penguin on the cover. Yay! Hooray for penguins! It’s an interesting way to study using Linux especially Ubuntu.

Things I liked about it:

• It’s in a comicbook format so it’s more like a story.
• It has a penguin character! And he’s explaining Linux to the user.
• The words are easy to understand.
• There are ’screenshots’ in the comic.
• Free Software concepts are being explained to users.

Things that need to be worked on:

• The illustrations’ lines aren’t as clean as I’d wish them to be.
• It gets a little too wordy in some frames.
• List of references could be added at the last page.
• List of terms could be added at the last page.

It’s a bit wordy in the first issue maybe because the contains a lot of introductory concepts like what Linux is, what GNU is, graphical user interfaces, etc. But at least it’s concise.

This is a good alternative material for beginners who feel intimidated by textbooks and online guides. Though I think this might be a good story to develop in animation. If this is animated, there’s a better way to show the flow of the instructions. It could also be used to focus on certain screenshots.