January Newsletter

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

New Forums Now Open

Get your questions answered in the forums for the newest Head First titles: Algebra, PHP & MySQL, Rails, and Web Design.

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.

The dreaded EJB question... addressed

Lots of folks have been clamoring to know about the second edition of Head First EJB. Click Play on the video below to get a direct answer... I promise. We'll be posting a lot more of these video Q&A; sessions in the weeks to come, as we try and address your questions in an even more direct manner.

Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Tuesday, Jan 13 Permalink | Comments (3)

Three Things You Can Do (Today) to Improve Your Website

Jeff Siarto is a User Experience and Web Designer living in Chicago. He is a co-author of Head First Web Design and writes about design and technology at his blog: siarto.com.

1. Simplify Everything

Remove unnecessary and extraneous content

People come to your website to find information. It might be to look at your portfolio, read about a recent vacation or find out how to get in touch with you. Your job as a web designer is to make this information accessible and easy to find. The easiest way to help people find the important content is to get rid of the stuff that seems trivial and non-essential. The next time you make changes to your homepage, try taking things out instead of adding. Maybe that Facebook status widget or your most recent 100 Tweets aren't as essential to the core content of your site as you thought. Think about the main content areas of your site and concentrate on making them better before even thinking about adding more.

Downsize your markup

Just as content can become cluttered and unorganized, so can your site's underlying markup. In a perfect world, the HTML that your site's built on would be an exact semantic representation of your content. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world and HTML (and it's variant XHTML) aren't perfect markup languages. With that in mind, it's important to try and make your markup as lean as possible. Is that extra container <div> really necessary? Do these items need to be in a list, or will a paragraph work just as well? Am I using tables for tabular data and not layout? Go through your markup — and just like you did with your page content — remove anything that isn't essential to the layout and semantics of your site. Organizing that tag soup will not only speed up your site, but also reduce browser inconsistencies and give clearer meaning to your content.

Reduce your site's download footprint

Believe it or not, not everyone is connecting to the Internet over a fast cable modem or DSL line. In areas where broadband is limited, some users still connect with dial-up, slow DSL or even satellite. These users can account for 5 to 15% of your total visitors and their experience on your site is just as important as those connecting from a super-fast campus LAN. Knowing that, files sizes and download times should always be considered when designing new pages or adding content and features to existing ones. Make sure you are using proper image compression for the given image type. Icons, fonts and logos typically perform best as GIFs while photographic images usually look best saved as JPEGs. Adjust the quality of your images to offer the best resolution and detail in the smallest possible file size. If you use Photoshop, the Save for Web feature will tell you how long a particular image will take to download at a given speed. Make note of these speeds so you have an idea of how long the site as a whole will take to download. In addition, using your browsers activity menu or web inspector (Safari/Webkit) can also help glean vital information on download speed and file size — often showing you exactly where you can expect bottle necks. Finally, see #1 and #2 above for ways to make your files smaller and faster.

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Posted by Jeff Siarto on Tuesday, Jan 13 Permalink | Comments (0)

Head First Rails: An Interview with David Griffiths

David Griffiths is the author of the newly released Head First Rails. We sat down with him recently and asked him a few questions about his favorite subject.

What are some of the coolest things learners can do once they've worked through Head First Rails?

Wow — there's so much cool stuff in the book, where to begin? I wanted to write a book where people didn't just get to know stuff, but they actually learnt how to do stuff. So really the whole book is about how to do cool things. Like build a custom web application in two minutes. Or manage multiple data sets in a single interface. Or create a mashup with Google maps. Or using Ajax in really practical ways, not just for eye-candy. Cool is really just another word for powerful and I want people to finish this book armed with practical skills that they can apply from the get-go.

How do you think the Head First approach to Rails is different from other non-Head-First Rails books you've seen and used? How do you think Head First makes Rails easier to learn?

A lot of books provide information about Rails, but Head First Rails gives you something else as well: motivation. Motivation is a really key thing in learning any new topic. It doesn't matter how smart you are, if you don't feel motivated, then it will be really hard to learn anything. So how does Head First Rails motivate you? It uses fun and drama and scenarios. It has characters and plots and twists and turns. We use a lot of the same tricks they use in movies. Why? Because we want the teaching material to be compelling, like a movie is compelling. Rails is this incredible development framework. Things that used to take me four or five hours, I can now do in four or five minutes in Rails. That's an exciting thing! And Head First Rails is designed to convey that excitement.

What topic do you think people struggle with most in Rails? How did you address that topic in a way that will help learners who have struggled before?

One problem that I had when I first looked at Rails was figuring out how to create master-detail applications. These are applications where the user needs to manage multiple pieces of related information. You might have a blog post and its related comments. Or the example we have in the book is an airline called Coconut Airways which needs a system to manage flights and seat bookings. Now Rails is great at generating applications for managing single pieces of information, but if you want to create a master-detail app, well... you pretty much have to do it yourself. And that involves knowing about lots of different topics like database relationships and partials and even advanced subjects like Ajax. Head First Rails teaches you all those things in an integrated way. You don't have to skip back and forth between chapters. When I'd finished that section of the book, I kind of wished I'd had it when I was learning Rails.

What topic or section of the book are you most proud of? What did you do to make it especially effective?

Continue reading "Head First Rails: An Interview with David Griffiths" »

Posted by Caitrin McCullough on Tuesday, Jan 13 Permalink | Comments (0)