I wanted to respond to Douglas, who is having problems with the QuizCardBuilder... First of all, Douglas, or anyone, you can always write to us directly for help if you're struggling with an exercise in the book, at kathy@wickedlysmart.com (my personal email, which is printed in the intro to the book, but I know a lot of folks skip the intro ; ).
I'll be happy to walk you through it. But in response to your comments, the code in the book and in the JAR do compile and run, so it appears that you are having a classpath problem, which we could help you correct with a little more info.
From the error you posted, the compiler simply cannot find the QuizCard class, which, if you place it in the same directory as QuizCardBuilder will compile *unless* your current directory is not in the classpath.
So, you could try the following:
javac -classpath . *.java, and see if that helps.
I agree that it is *terribly* frustrating when examples don't work, and if you are having a problem, then even if the code in the book (and JAR) is correct, we might have missed a critical part of the explanation that makes it work for you. Perhaps much earlier in the book, we didn't do a good enough job at making things clear, and for that we apologize and would like to help. In the book's defense, though, the QuizCardBuilder *does* work, both in the book and in the JAR.
So, if you let us know what we can do to help, we'll do our best for you.
As for the content being diluted with contrived wording, we have to agree with you. This we do by design, as part of the learning approach explained at the beginning of the book. But what works for many can really be annoying to some. We hope that, before buying, readers will look at the book or sample pages and see if they find the style appealing... or, well, NOT. ; ) We don't want *anyone* to *not* know what they're getting into, so the sample pages are an excellent representation of what the book is really like. A Head First book is quite different from a traditional text, and we've done our best to make that clear on the cover, the intro, the descriptions on O'Reilly and Amazon, author interviews, etc.
But again, if there is anything that we can do to help you get through the exercises, we are here. We listed our personal emails in the intro , specifically because we feel the same way that you do--it's really frustrating when you can't get an exercise to work, especially in a book that advertises itself as a "learning book". I'm still encouraged by the fact that you made it all the way to chapter 14, though. If you'll give us a chance, we'll do whatever we can to help you get through the rest.
-Kathy Sierra (Bert too)
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