It’s aimed at the younger market, obviously, with the Manga approach maybe sweetening the technical details. Comic books, and Manga in particular, are becoming more popular these days, I believe.

Ayumi

The idea is that you follow a character, Ayumi, who gets to learn about computer hardware.

The publishers, No Starch Press, set the scene:

Ayumi is a world-class shogi (Japanese chess) player who can’t be beaten—that is, until she loses to a powerful computer called the Shooting Star. Ayumi vows to find out everything she can about her new nemesis. Lucky for her, Yuu Kano, the genius programmer behind the Shooting Star, is willing to teach her all about the inner workings of the microprocessor—the “brain” inside all computers, phones, and gadgets.

Topics covered include:

• How the CPU processes information and makes decisions
• How computers perform arithmetic operations and store information
• Logic gates and how they’re used in integrated circuits
• Components of computers, including registers, GPUs, and RAM
• Assembly language and how it differs from high-level programming languages

Interested? You can sample the style of the book by downloading the chapter on Digital Operations. You’ll see it is in black and white, not colour.

It’s been a productive approach for the author, who has also written The Manga Guide to Fourier Transforms and The Manga Guide to Semiconductors!

Author

The lead author, Michio Shibuya, is a graduate of Tokai University’s electrical engineering department and former nuclear magnetic resonance researcher. He been a MOS product designer and developer for over 12 years and

Details

Title: The Manga Guide to Microprocessors
Author: Michio Shibuya, Takashi Tonagi, and Office Sawa
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: August 2017
Paperback: 264 pages
Language: English
Price: $24.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-59327-817-5

Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: What Does the CPU Do?
Chapter 2: Digital Operations
Chapter 3: CPU Architecture
Chapter 4: Operations
Chapter 5: Programs
Chapter 6: Microcontrollers
Epilogue