Oh hell yes, I really like the covers in that article you linked. It's just amusing to me that "A buff dude and a hot chick fighting dinosaurs on a volcano on mars" somehow is analogous to "Porting COBOL to Excel in TPS reports". The "Pair Programming" one at the end is good, because there is some sort of vague connection you could make with the image. It's like saying "by doing how to do this boring and specific thing you're KINDA JUST LIKE THE GUY ON THE COVER TOO SO YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BUY THIS BOOK". They say sex sells, but what does it sell? This is like an experiment in the most unsexy thing that sex could sell.

The programming textbooks today just seem a bit too 'quirky' by having a single animal or something on the front cover that this is the extreme version of.