Crossword Puzzles in the Books and Beyond

I am one of those people who love crossword puzzles. Scratch that. I am one of those people who don't feel right unless they do at least one (and more often two or three) crossword puzzles a day.

Yes I am an addict. I am aware of this.

So you would think that I also adore the fact that crossword puzzles are a component of the Head First teaching style...but to be be honest...I'm not so sure if my love of the puzzle extends to my editorial day-job.

Why you ask?

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Wednesday, Oct 31 Permalink | Comments (5)

Fugitive Words and Visual Brainstorming

Ever try to find that elusive word or concept that you know for sure is hiding somewhere in your brain but stubbornly refuses to be found? This happens to me repeatedly when I'm trying to write anything (and especially if I'm trying to be witty).

I've stumbled on a very clever tool for helping to find in the quickest way possible that elusive word fugitive. It's a program called Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus and it uses a kind of interactive mapping application to generate word associations visually. I find it much more helpful than the traditional linear, step-by step process typical of most thesauruses. And it corresponds nicely with the Head First emphasis on showing words and concepts visually in order to "see" (even atypical) relationships.

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Posted by Keith McNamara on Tuesday, Oct 30 Permalink | Comments (3)

Interactive Learning: What works for you?

As the web producer on the team, I spend a lot of time looking for ways to bring the Head First pedagogy into our online offerings. It's a slow process, as there are a lot of technologies to consider, but every now and then we find something pretty cool. Like the Hands-On SQL interface that Andrew Cumming wrote for us. And just last week, one of our prospective authors send me a beta version of an awesome fridge magnets application (you can try it out here), which I'd love to make available for all of the fridge magnets exercises in our books.

What I'd like to know from our readers is: what helps you learn?

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Monday, Oct 29 Permalink | Comments (7)

A Book I Want to Read

To take this a step further: I'm not interested in writing that isn't obsessive. Who is? We're all drama queens in the end. We all come to stories with two basic questions: Who do I care about? And What do they care about? As long as our hero, or heroine, cares deeply about something (i.e. is obsessed), and as long as they're willing to tell us their own twisted version of the truth, we'll come along for the ride.

This passage came from an article entitled The Obsession Engine
Why House of Rock with Bret Michaels could be your next novel. Or not. I read on Amazon by Steve Almond in support of his latest book (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Friday, Oct 26 Permalink | Comments (0)

Vocabulary and Free Rice

A friend of mine recently pointed me at Free Rice, a vocabulary testing game with the added benefit of each word you get right, the site donates "10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger." The charity aspect is pretty cool, but what really hooks me is the game itself. There's no competition -- you can keep playing as long as you like, no matter how many words you get wrong. The only incentive is the little tally of rice on the side of the screen... and the "I Rule" feeling every time you get a word right. That second part is what's keeping me on this site instead of doing my work.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Thursday, Oct 25 Permalink | Comments (2)

Joining the (mental) gym

Yes, I know you Head First readers are way more in shape and buff than me (it wouldn't be hard, trust me), and you've got the Gold/Platinum/Plutonium Plan at your local gym to prove it. But apparently these days, that's not enough. You need to exercise your cerebrum too, not just your glutes.

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Posted by Sanders Kleinfeld on Wednesday, Oct 24 Permalink | Comments (0)

Movie Night

So Mike Morrison, the author of our forthcoming book Head First JavaScript sent me this hilarious link to a movie that helped him break through a case of writers block (don't worry, the book will still be out in late December).

King of Kong, a tale filled with challenge, self-discovery, game theory, humor, a spattering of mullets, and the ultimate "I Rule" moment of being crowned victorious!

Did we mention that it's a documentary about two guys battling for the world record high score in Donkey Kong?! Totally Awesome.

Posted by Catherine Nolan on Tuesday, Oct 23 Permalink | Comments (0)

Things I Like

So unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware that the New York Times recently ended their subscription service and opened up their sites to everyone with Internet Access. I think that this is fantastic! So in order to celebrate this, I now link you to an article about another one of my favorite things:

Librarians.

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Monday, Oct 22 Permalink | Comments (0)

That great big voice in the sky

I've thankfully never been into or hooked upon soap operas (although you could argue anything on in the evening that's "character-driven" is little more than a revamped soap opera), but I've from time to time seen a TiVoed or YouTubed episode when a cast member is played by a new actor. In many of these sequences, you hear this awful voice come over the loudspeaker, The part of John Danvers is now played by Louise Simonson.

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Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Friday, Oct 19 Permalink | Comments (1)

Foo Camp and Word Hacking

Okay - I've said before that one of the great perks of working on these books is all the really great people that I have the opportunity to meet and talk with including our readers, our fans, our authors, and the FOOs (Friends Of O'Reilly).

So this past year, I was the recipient of one of the greatest invites I've ever had in my life. I was invited to FOO Camp. Now there were a lot of sessions on learning and how the brain works (which I'll definitely be talking about in further posts), but there was also this one session titled Make Your Own Word (Hacking English) presented by Erin McKean.

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Thursday, Oct 18 Permalink | Comments (6)

They're so smart, they're telepathic...

I received an interesting mail today, on something I'd almost forgotten about:

There's one thing I find really distracting. All of your speech balloons use a string of circles to connect the speaker to the words. If you buy any comic book off the shelf in the USA you'll see that this means the words aren't being spoken, they are being thought.

Here's my reply, for those who have noticed the same thing...

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Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Wednesday, Oct 17 Permalink | Comments (2)

How do you like your learning?

At Head First, we know that learning styles vary widely from person to person, which is why we use multiple presentation styles to teach each concept: diagrams for visual learners, dialogues for aural learners, exercises for people who tend to learn best by jumping right in and experimenting.

But this begs the all-important question: What kind of learner are you?

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Posted by Sanders Kleinfeld on Tuesday, Oct 16 Permalink | Comments (3)

Nobody's Perfect

So - nobody's perfect...right? Even us. We know we make mistakes. But...should you do if you find an error in our book? Submit Errata.

So there's a lot of places that people do this - but we prefer that you go to www.oreilly.com, search for the book in question, and you'll find a link right under the book description that says View/Submit Errata. This is the best way for us to be sure that we're getting everything - and not making the same mistake twice.

Posted by Catherine Nolan on Monday, Oct 15 Permalink | Comments (3)

Great Essay on Creative Thinking

One of the great things about Head First being part of the O'Reilly family is that we get to work with a lot of really great...I mean really great people. I wanted to point our readers to another one of our authors, Scott Berkun, who doesn't write for Head First, but is one of our fans.

Well guess what. I'm a fan of his work too. In addition to his two great books, The Myths of Innovation, and The Art of Project Management, he writes a lot of really cool essays on things that mean a lot to us at Head First.

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Friday, Oct 12 Permalink | Comments (6)

More voices == better books

I mentioned yesterday that I've been conducting a Head First author training in Boston. We've got about 18 authors (although not that many books) represented, and I've been having the time of my life. What's amazing at these sessions is not so much the teaching, but the learning. Sound strange for the guy that's conducting the training to do the learning? Not so much, at least not in Head First land...

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Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Thursday, Oct 11 Permalink | Comments (0)

We are gawered herwe togewer...

Okay, so it's hard to write the accent of that crazy minister in The Princess Bride, but hopefully you get the idea. Anyway, I'm writing from a hotel in Boston. In just about an hour, we'll start one of our semi-annual Head First training sessions. These are onsite three-day events that we hold for authors that have passed the audition phase for a Head First book. It's one of the most exciting times for us here at Head First, because it's really where all of our new books are birthed (yes, I said "birthed," not "born," because birthed implies a lot of pain).

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Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Wednesday, Oct 10 Permalink | Comments (1)

Music and the Brain

This month's Wired has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks, whose new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is a series of case studies that explore the role music plays in our mental lives. One of the things Sacks finds most striking is the "therapeutic power of music", its transformative abilities on even the most profoundly brain-damaged people:

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Posted by Sanders Kleinfeld on Friday, Oct 5 Permalink | Comments (2)

Sometime Inspiring....Sometimes just Funny

So we're working on Science and Math titles to branch out the Head First Family. Look for our first offerings there starting next year...and no I'm not going to be overly specific about when next year.

One of the places that I tend to send authors for inspiration...or sometimes when I think that they just need a break is http://xkcd.com . xkcd bills itself as: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Friday, Oct 5 Permalink | Comments (0)

A New Kind of Engineer

So did anyone else happen to see the recent article in the NY Times Magazine about Re-engineering Engineering? The article about the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA contrasts their novel yet successful approach to teaching against the current state of undergraduate studies for wannabe Engineers.

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Posted by Catherine Nolan on Thursday, Oct 4 Permalink | Comments (1)