Andrew Stellman: Why Projects Fail

Here's the latest from Andrew Stellman, coauthor of Head First PMP and Head First C#.

Jenny and I have been doing a really neat talk lately called "Why Projects Fail". (You can download a PDF of the slides from this post our blog, if you're interested.) Near the beginning of the presentation, we have a slide that says this:

Software projects are a lot like cheesy horror movies. After you've seen a few of them, you know that the first guy to leave the group is going to get an axe in his head. Projects are the same way. People keep making the same mistakes over and over, and it keeps getting their projects killed.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Thursday, Jan 31 Permalink | Comments (0)

Andrew Stellman: The challenge of challenging the learner

Here's another from Andrew Stellman, coauthor of Head First PMP and Head First C#.

In my last post, Pushing the Interactivity Envelope, I started talking a little bit about the exercises in Head First C#. We gave our readers lots of exercises—programming problems and puzzles that let our readers "stretch" their programming "legs" and solve problems independently. Well, it turns out that when it came to actually writing the exercises, we found that creating exercises for our readers was one of the toughest, most time-consuming things we did. That may seem a little odd; you'd think that the hard part is teaching the material, and that the exercises are just there to help you apply what you've learned. That's basically how I thought about it when we first got started writing the book. But it didn't stay that way.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Wednesday, Jan 30 Permalink | Comments (1)

Andrew Stellman: Pushing the interactivity envelope

Here's the latest from Andrew Stellman, coauthor of Head First PMP and Head First C#.

Before I start today's post, I want to put in a little plug for Building Better Software—that's a blog where Jenny and I write about building software. If you like what you're reading here, you can keep up with us there! And if you want to get in touch with us, that's the best way to do it. Okay, onto the post!

One thing that makes a Head First book unique is that it really focuses on interaction. If you flip to the introduction of any Head First book, you'll see this:

We included challenges, with exercises, and by asking questions that don't always have a straight answer, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember when it has to work at something. Think about it: you can't get your body in shape just by watching people at the gym. But we did our best to make sure that when you're working hard, it's on the right things. That you're not spending one extra dendrite processing a hard-to-understand example, or parsing difficult, jargon-laden, or overly terse text.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Tuesday, Jan 29 Permalink | Comments (0)

Andrew Stellman: How we made Head First C# different

This week we're hearing from Andrew Stellman, coauthor of Head First PMP and Head First C#.

First of all, hi there! I'm Andrew Stellman, author of Head First C# and Head First PMP. My coauthor, Jenny Greene, and I will be guest bloggers here for the next two weeks. So you'll get to know a little about us, and (hopefully) a lot more about some of the things that we like to write about.

And I thought that a good way to start out our guest blogging gig would be to give you a little insight into the kind of thinking that went into writing Head First C#. Specifically, I want to tell you a little bit about how we made Head First C# different—and, I hope, better!—than pretty much any other programming book I've ever seen.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Monday, Jan 28 Permalink | Comments (0)

Russ Miles: 'Commit' like your life depends on it

Another blog entry from Head First Software Development author Russ Miles. Enjoy!

No, contrary to how the title of this post sounds, we're not talking about life long commitment to your partner here (although that can be fun and challenging too, no doubt). Today I'm going to delve into a little lesson I learned a while back that will keep you in good stead as you carve out a career in software development.

It all starts with...

"Are you sure?" *

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Friday, Jan 25 Permalink | Comments (2)

Russ Miles: Software Consultants Care Too (well, great ones do)

Here's the latest from Head First Software Development author Russ Miles. Enjoy!

Yesterday I talked about people being the 'special sauce' of really great software development, and today I thought I'd take things a bit further and closer to home for me, into the realm of 'consultants'. As a consultant myself I really love working alongside great (and even not so great) development teams and I take a huge amount of satisfaction in delivering what a client needs. However consultants tend to have a bit of a bad name, and it is that myth I wanted to talk about here.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Thursday, Jan 24 Permalink | Comments (0)

Russ Miles: At the heart of great software are great people

Here's another post by Head First Software Development author Russ Miles. Enjoy!

Yesterday I got to thinking about what was the one thing that characterizes successful software development, and after a while I actually realized that the answer is fairly simple. In a nutshell, it's all down to:

People.

Or, more accurately, great teams made up of people. To give you a flavor of where I'm coming from, see if the following feels familiar to you:

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Wednesday, Jan 23 Permalink | Comments (0)

Russ Miles: What not to write about in a real software development book

Here's our first entry by Head First Software Development author Russ Miles. Enjoy!

Ok, so this is my first post to the Head First blogs (which is a fantastic honor) and, continuing on from Mike's great posts a couple of weeks back, I'd like to lift the lid on one of the hardest things Dan and I encountered when writing Head First Software Development, and I call it "dropping our illusions".

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Tuesday, Jan 22 Permalink | Comments (2)

Your brain on politics

As presidential primary season gets under way in the U.S. and voters begin to align their loyalties with their candidate of choice, here's an interesting hypothesis to ponder: what if our political leanings are ingrained in our brain chemistry?

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Posted by Sanders Kleinfeld on Thursday, Jan 17 Permalink | Comments (0)

Talking Turtle

More from David Griffiths, author of the upcoming Head First Ruby on Rails:

I noticed that someone recently posted the 1983 documentary "Talking Turtle" (I think it was originally from the BBC series "Horizon") on Google video.

It is about Seymour Papert's work with computers in schools.

I found this life changing at the time and it was the program that made me want to work in computers. Now, looking back on it after all this time, I can see how the principles Papert (and before him, Piaget) discussed could be applied today. Papert's book Mindstorms is also a great read (with a real Head First introduction to juggling...) and I can personally recommend the Mindstorms LEGO kit (thanks Dawn).

Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Wednesday, Jan 16 Permalink | Comments (3)

The Brain's Irrelevance Filter

David Griffiths pointed out this article a few weeks ago: Brain 'irrelevance filter' found

Using fMRI scans, scientists located a specific place in the brain that is more active while a person is filtering out distracting information. This is particularly interesting to the Head First team because we're always conscious of potential distractions in our books. Even though we use fun images and jokes, the goal is to always be relevant to the learning. (Sometimes we have to discourage our authors from trying to be "too" funny!) All the different things on a typical Head First page are meant to keep your attention, not distract from the text.

What helps you filter out distractions while you're trying to learn? Are there elements in Head First books you find more distracting than helpful?

Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Tuesday, Jan 15 Permalink | Comments (1)

HF JavaScript: Learn outside the book

We know the Head First series offers some of the most interactive tech books around, but there are limits to what we can feasibly do within the confines of the printed page. Much as we'd like to, we can't engage your auditory learning centers by having characters speak to you, or let you slide around our Code Magnets without having to slice and dice the page with a pair of scissors.

And that's why one of our big goals this year is to provide you with more interactive content online to get around the inevitable restrictions of the print medium.

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Posted by Sanders Kleinfeld on Monday, Jan 14 Permalink | Comments (3)

Michael Morrison: Thank You Al Jaffee

Here's the last installment (this week, anyway!) from Head First JavaScript author Michael Morrison. Enjoy!

One of the highlights of tagging along to the grocery store with my Mom as a kid was getting a new issue of Mad magazine. And probably my favorite thing in Mad magazine was the fold-in that appeared on the inside back cover of most issues. Fast forward a couple of decades and I'm thinking about unusual ways to engage readers in Head First JavaScript. Mad magazine fold-ins popped into my head, and Page Benders were born.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Friday, Jan 11 Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Morrison: Thinking in Metaphors

Here's installment #4 from Head First JavaScript author Michael Morrison. Enjoy!

A big part of the Head First approach to teaching involves metaphors, where a challenging concept is recast into a form that is more immediately accessible. I have a natural tendency to "think in metaphors," which helped quite a bit in writing Head First JavaScript. And as it turns out, thinking in metaphors is extremely useful in sorting out any complex issue, whether it's JavaScript, SQL, C#, or a complex real world issue such as molding behavior in children (more on that one in a moment).

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Thursday, Jan 10 Permalink | Comments (1)

Michael Morrison: The Commodore 64 and JavaScript

Here is the next installment from Head First JavaScript author Michael Morrison. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago Head First team member Keith McNamara blogged about the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64 computer. And it got me thinking about my own history with the computer, how it shaped my future in technology, and how it affected my ability to learn about technology. I'm part of a generation of computer tinkerers who learned how to program computers thanks to the Commodore 64 and the BASIC programming language. And now, 25 years later, a new generation of explorers will learn how to program computers thanks to JavaScript.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Wednesday, Jan 9 Permalink | Comments (2)

Michael Morrison: Engineering Failure

Here is the second installment from Head First JavaScript author Michael Morrison. Enjoy!

When my brother and I were kids, we liked to race our bicycles around the outside of our house. Being over five years older than me, my brother had a bad habit of showboating and taunting as he inevitably beat me time and time again. One day my Dad decided to teach my brother a lesson, and closed the gate we were riding through, knowing that my brother would be too busy looking over his shoulder taunting to notice the gate. My brother crashed into the gate and had quite a wipeout. My Dad had tired of warning him verbally, and eventually decided that real pain might send the message a little clearer.

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Tuesday, Jan 8 Permalink | Comments (0)

Featured Author: Michael Morrison on Head First Behind the Scenes: Storyboarding

Today is the first installment from Head First JavaScript author Michael Morrison. Enjoy!

So this week the Head First team is turning the blog reigns over to an author. And a loose cannon of an author at that...hope I don't disappoint.

Since I am an author, I thought it might be fun to kick things off this week with a look behind the scenes at how these books come together. I was more than a little surprised when I first learned that Head First books are written entirely by hand on paper before they ever make their way to electronic form. That's right, the Head First team keeps it old school!

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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Monday, Jan 7 Permalink | Comments (4)

What do you want to read from Head First authors?

We're going to try something new in the next few weeks: Featured Author entries. You'll hear from Mike Morrison (Head First JavaScript) and Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene (Head First C# and Head First PMP). We hope to have feature other authors in the future as well—if we can catch them when they're not already up to their ears in a project!

So with the upcoming feature in mind, I want to ask: what do YOU want to see your favorite Head First author expound on? Is there something in a book that begs for more explanation? Or maybe you're more curious about what they do when they're not toiling over storyboards and annotations. I'll do my best to convey your question to our authors and get it answered!

Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Friday, Jan 4 Permalink | Comments (18)

Why don't you TELL us what you want

I've taken a few days off from posting more thoughts on anticipation (see the previous few blog entries), largely because everyone's on holiday and probably not spending much time reading Head First blogs :-) We'll get back to anticipation in another day or two, but in the meantime, I had a much more important question... one that only YOU can answer.

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Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Thursday, Jan 3 Permalink | Comments (9)

HF Books and Reference Books

I recently received an email from a Head First reader suggesting we consider creating supplemental Head First reference books for the existing titles in the series: materials that would presumably provide a summary/recap of key concepts and skills covered in the books that readers could quickly refer to as needed.

I'll admit, the idea of HF reference books had never occurred to me, but I can see how many folks would find them useful. HF books are amazing learning tools, but what happens when you've finished reading, say, HF JavaScript or SQL, and just want to refer back to the main specs on the XMLHttpRequest object or the SELECT statement? In our books, the key details on the syntax, parameters, implementation, etc., may be spread out over several pages and couched within narratives and other teaching devices we use like Fireside Chats and No Dumb Questions. In other words, HF books are far from ideal as reference books.

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Posted by Sanders Kleinfeld on Wednesday, Jan 2 Permalink | Comments (6)