Jennifer Greene: Scarface and Head First C#

By Caitrin McCullough

Here's our first post from Jennifer Greene, coauthor of Head First PMP and Head First C#.

When we were starting to write Head First C# I had just bought Scarface for the Wii. The opening level for the game was really memorable and cool. It starts where the movie leaves off: you are Scarface, a super-powerful drug dealer with rocket launchers and machine guns and henchmen and a total potty mouth-- and you are under siege. Right off the bat, you get to use all of these giant weapons and do tons of damage as you fight your way out of your enormous mansion. Then the game takes all of that stuff away from you and you spend the rest of the levels slowly building your power back up. For me, that experience was really motivating. Being able to do a lot really quickly was so much fun that it sucked me in and made the process of working my way through the game that much more rewarding.

So when it came to writing the first chapter of Head First C#, the experience of playing that game was really fresh in my mind. Andrew and I knew we couldn't do something as lame as Hello, world! for this book and we knew that we wanted to give or readers a glimpse at the power of the IDE they'd be using too. We came up with a lot of ideas before we finally settled on doing something really big as a first project. The very first thing you accomplish when you pick up Head First C# is a database application with pretty complex GUI and an installer that lets you publish it to other people's machines. You do most of it using tools that are built into the IDE. It's cool for a lot of reasons, it helps you to understand how to use the IDE, it helps you to get acquainted with the GUI elements you're going to be using through the rest of the book, and it lets you build something really kick ass, really fast so you can get a glimpse of the rock star you'll be by the time you finish the book.

We were trying to give the reader that same feeling that I had when I was playing Scarface's first level, the feeling that that it was fun being able to accomplish a lot really quickly and that it was going to be a rewarding journey getting from the beginning to the end of the game. I hope you feel the sense of accomplishment in writing that first program that i did when i finally made it out of that mansion without getting shot. I hope that sense of accomplishment makes it all the more worthwhile to step back and understand what was going on in the language and in the IDE when you were building it.

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