Head First Books Now Available in PDF

Newly available Head First PDFs feature in a major announcement from O'Reilly's electronic publishing initiative. Read it here.

December Newsletter

We sent out our December Newsletter recently. Sign up here to receive future newsletters via email.

Head First Rails Code Posted

We posted code downloads for all the chapters of Head First Rails currently available in Rough Cuts. Get them here!

Special Announcement: Head First PDFs

Hey there, Head First fans. It's been a crazy year for us here at Head First, and we've been working hard to end the year on an amazing, Joe-Frank-and-Jim would-love-this note. You've already seen our latest newsletter, where we've made sample chapters available for our four latest books. But never ones to be satisfied, we've got some more gifts you can put under your tree.

First, and probably most exciting to the little elves here in Head First land, not one, not two, but all of the Head First books are now available as PDFs. Surf on over to this complete list of Head First titles, and check it out. You can buy PDFs of every single one. That's right, now you've got the perfect companion for those 18-hour drives home to visit family... without the heft of 50 pounds of books to weigh you down. You've been asking for it for years, so it's our pleasure to make PDF books available for purchase. Check 'em out, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Friday, Dec 19 Permalink | Comments (0)

The power of mishtakes

Next year is the 30th anniversary of The Book of Heroic Failures by Stephen Pile. It's like the Guinness Book of World Records for the clumsy, the forgetful and the just plain confused.

• Like the civil servant from Andorra who forgot to attend the peace treaty signing in 1919, resulting in Andorra being the only country in history to have taken part in two World Wars at the same time.
• Or Douglas Corrigan, who intended to make an historic flight from New York to California, but because of a navigational error landed in Ireland.

Throughout human history, failure has been our constant companion. No matter how hard people try, no matter how many systems and backup systems and backup-backup systems we put in place, stuff still goes wrong.

Now if you are running a Nuclear Power Station, or a hospital, or a government department then failure is a bad thing and a lot of your time is probably spent in finding ways of preventing it.

But the truth is that at Head First we don't see mistakes as always a bad thing. In fact we kind of like failure.

And it's all to do with the way that your brain works. Read more...

Continue reading "The power of mishtakes" »

Posted by David Griffiths on Thursday, Dec 18 Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you read the book from that movie?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that media is changing the way books are viewed. In fact, video — and YouTube in particular — has already changed how books are sold. Most big fiction releases are heralded by short "book trailers" that give an almost movie-like feel to the contents of the book.

But in a recent article published by the Christian Science Monitor, I was surprised to see that there's an even more notable link between movies and the sale of books.

Click here to read the rest of this post on O'Reilly Radar.

Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Wednesday, Nov 12 Permalink | Comments (1)