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How can we make it easier for you?
Head First books cover a lot of ground. We take you from someone who may have never seen the technology in question before to someone who can actually do something real (and cool!) with it. You can build a real web site at the end of Head First HTML, you can code an entire arcade game at the end of Head First C#, and so on.
At the same time, because we know how your brain works, we don't try to cover everything. You don't need to know every obscure JavaScript method before you can code a blog site, and you don't need to know every design pattern before you can start using them. More importantly, if you bothered memorizing all of them you wouldn't have enough brain energy left for the good stuff! We know you're smart—you can find the references you need. What's important is teaching you how to use them once you find them.
But sometimes you need to know something before you get started, and we don't tell you. Either because a lot of our readers probably already know, and we don't want to bore them, or because the material would span a lot of our books and it seems like cheating if we just copy it over and over again. Things like:
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Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Monday, Mar 31 Permalink | Comments (19)
It'll take about three weeks...
If you've been reading our posts here, you probably noticed that we like to give our "Why Projects Fail" talk. (If you're curious, here's a link to the slides [PDF].) One reason we really like it is that it seems to go over well with a lot of different audiences, from hard-core architects and programmers to grey-haired project managers. It's a pretty informal talk—we interrupt each other and go off on the occasional tangent, which keeps the mood pretty light. And that's always a good thing, especially when you're doing a talk to people at a PMI meeting or a user group who just spent the day at work and don't need to sit through yet another boring slide presentation.
I was thinking about that presentation yesterday, after getting off the phone with a manager at a company that wants to hire us to do software estimation training for their programmers. One problem that they're having is a pretty common one. Their programmers, testers, and even project managers seem reluctant to give estimates. That reminded me of this slide from the talk:
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Posted by Andrew Stellman on Friday, Mar 21 Permalink | Comments (1)
Head First or Head Rush?
Late in 2006, the Head First series was going pretty strong, and lots of people were really into a new technology called Ajax. The folks at Head First Labs went deep underground, and surfaced in February with a new title:
The book has done pretty well, and lots of people have learned Ajax from it, which is cool. But, there seems to be one question that keeps coming up, over and over.
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Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Monday, Mar 3 Permalink | Comments (19)
Head First SQL
Is your data dragging you down? Are your tables all tangled up? Well we've got the tools to teach you just how to wrangle your databases into submission. Available now in bookstores everywhere!
Head First C#
Finally, there's a bright alternative to the legions of dull C# tutorials. Head First C# gives beginning programmers a way to learn Microsoft's popular object-oriented language without boring you with a pile of dry technical material.