I am in the business of trying to caste new visual (and full-sensorium) idioms for understanding abstract information in scientific disciplines. Scott's books are incredible sources for insight into the discipline of communicating with other than words.
Scott's view of the worlds we create with our imaginations and the way we can send consistent, rich, clear signals using minimal tools (pen & ink?) is awesome.
It will take years for the rest of us to catch up with Scott's work, but in the meantime I am sure I will read and reread his work as I once did my Marvel and DC comics.
This time it is work!
In particular, I found his obsevations on how comics (as an art) were influenced and constrained by print (as a medium) and how those constraints (but not others) can be abandoned when comics make the transition to a digital medium such as the web to be spot-on, and very useful to me although I'm a web designer, and not a comics artist.
The book offers a lot of other insights as well, in particular centered around how the comics industry came to be, and the disintermediating effect of the internet on that industry.
Still, McCloud's discussions and insights on the nature of the production and distribution of comics are worth the read. His ideas about the future of comics on the internet are less convincing (he suggests the prime advantage of internet comics are an avoidance of the confines of the physical page; in my opinion, restrictions like that, in any art form, usually provide both limits and opportunities).
Anyone with an interest in the distribution of comics, or any art form, will find much of the book insightful and helpful. Many people new to the internet will find the discussion of it useful. But techies, especially those who have studied hypertext, won't learn anything new about the net here.
In summary, this book is recommended for its content, but the essay-as-comics form isn't as effective this time around. The same material could probably have been presented as straight text with a few illustrations, and the resulting book would have had the same impact in fewer pages. The arguments are interesting, if not wholly convincing, and the inclusion of an index and a bibliography round it out nicely.
