As the co-author of this book, I wanted to offer my sincerest apology to R.Shay for the experience you had with the book. Bert and I are 100% responsible for this book, and we just don't have any excuse for having errata. As you can tell from looking at the book, Head First is not like anything any of us have done before, and for this very first book in the series, we had to build a development process from scratch.
Um, obviously, we have some lessons learned with this first release, and we're grateful to all the early adopters who've given us feedback. But that's no excuse, and Bert and I feel awful about having errata. We always used to think books should be so *easy* to make perfect, especially when compared with software...
Having said that, however, we might have misunderstood your problem about the Code Magnet exercise from Chapter 1, because it *does* work just as it is printed in the book, and it doesn't use any of the snippets more than once.
For the "Be the Compiler" exercise, we don't show output in Chapter 1, because those code listings don't produce any. But, you gave us a good idea—we hadn't considered showing the output of the changed code; our intent was to show output only when the exercise code (unchanged) really *did* have output. But it might be nice in the future to show the output from the 'fixed' versions. If our instructions were misleading, then we have a usability issue even if it's not a technical error.
I do want to add that--as horrified as we are about it--this book (still in its first printing) doesn't have any *more* errata than the average technical book, even among the top-sellers, and the largest percentage of the errata are non-technical typos. But that doesn't make it OK!! We just want folks to know that they're likely to find as much errata in another programming book. (Although I personally think it's worse to have errata in a book like this one, because we're so concerned that beginners have a positive experience.)
We do wish that you had written to us at the email listed in the front of the book (kathy@wickedlysmart.com), so that we could have at least tried to help you with the exercises. And although it sounds way too late for this, if there is ANYTHING we can do to help you give it a second chance, we'll do our best.
And for anyone else reading this, PLEASE don't hesitate to write us with questions, problems, comments, drink recipes, and for the *real* book gossip like, "How did things turn out with Lucy and Larry?" or "How did Jen *really* know that Brad is well-encapsulated?" or "Did the duck live?"
Cheers and thanks to all for your much-needed feedback! I can promise you that Bert and I will work our butts off trying to help you learn Java.
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