I originally wrote this review a while ago and just never published it so here it is.
It’s a manga. About databases. Yes, seriously. Not to be confused with “The Mongo Guide to Databases”, since MongoDB didn’t exist when this manga was published in 2004 (English translation in 2009).
Basically, it teaches you the basics of databases and SQL. It’s not very deep and the novelty wears off pretty quickly. There’s a cliche and annoying excuse of a plot. I guess this book might be helpful if you’re a complete beginner at databases or if you’re a database-phobe and anime girls are the only way to force yourself to learn about databases. I’ll give it credit for its handy SQL cheat sheet at the end of the book.
But wait, there’s more! A whole series of manga guides, in fact, although only a few have been translated into English. I also read The Manga Guide to Concrete (translated into simplified Chinese) which I liked a lot more than this databases book, maybe because I knew absolutely nothing about concrete beforehand and wasn’t bored the whole time. (The Mandarin word for concrete, 混凝土, has a fascinating etymology. Some Japanese guy picked the characters 混凝土 which both semantically describe concrete and are pronounced in Japanese similar to the English pronunciation of concrete, and then Mandarin just directly borrowed the same characters, but the Mandarin pronunciations of those characters are completely different. This is a bit like how the Chinese characters for McDonald’s only sounds like McDonald’s when pronounced in Cantonese but not in Mandarin.)