I am one of those people who love crossword puzzles. Scratch that. I am one of those people who don't feel right unless they do at least one (and more often two or three) crossword puzzles a day. Yes I...
Ever try to find that elusive word or concept that you know for sure is hiding somewhere in your brain but stubbornly refuses to be found? This happens to me repeatedly when I'm trying to write anything (and especially if...
As the web producer on the team, I spend a lot of time looking for ways to bring the Head First pedagogy into our online offerings. It's a slow process, as there are a lot of technologies to consider, but...
Revised Java code for Head First Design Patterns is now available on the book page....
To take this a step further: I'm not interested in writing that isn't obsessive. Who is? We're all drama queens in the end. We all come to stories with two basic questions: Who do I care about? And What do...
A friend of mine recently pointed me at Free Rice, a vocabulary testing game with the added benefit of each word you get right, the site donates "10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger."...
Yes, I know you Head First readers are way more in shape and buff than me (it wouldn't be hard, trust me), and you've got the Gold/Platinum/Plutonium Plan at your local gym to prove it. But apparently these days, that's...
So Mike Morrison, the author of our forthcoming book Head First JavaScript sent me this hilarious link to a movie that helped him break through a case of writers block (don't worry, the book will still be out in late...
So unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware that the New York Times recently ended their subscription service and opened up their sites to everyone with Internet Access. I think that this is fantastic! So in order...
Here's your chance to take the first look inside the pages of the upcoming Head First JavaScript. This excerpt explains identifiers....
We sent out our October Newsletter earlier this week. Sign up here to receive future newsletters via email....
I've thankfully never been into or hooked upon soap operas (although you could argue anything on in the evening that's "character-driven" is little more than a revamped soap opera), but I've from time to time seen a TiVoed or YouTubed...
Okay - I've said before that one of the great perks of working on these books is all the really great people that I have the opportunity to meet and talk with including our readers, our fans, our authors, and...
We've just put up an interface where you can practice queries from Head First SQL on the tables in the book....
I received an interesting mail today, on something I'd almost forgotten about: There's one thing I find really distracting. All of your speech balloons use a string of circles to connect the speaker to the words. If you buy any...
At Head First, we know that learning styles vary widely from person to person, which is why we use multiple presentation styles to teach each concept: diagrams for visual learners, dialogues for aural learners, exercises for people who tend to...
Check out what the Head First team is reading by going to our updated Bookstore page....
So - nobody's perfect...right? Even us. We know we make mistakes. But...should you do if you find an error in our book? Submit Errata. So there's a lot of places that people do this - but we prefer that you...
One of the great things about Head First being part of the O'Reilly family is that we get to work with a lot of really great...I mean really great people. I wanted to point our readers to another one of...
I mentioned yesterday that I've been conducting a Head First author training in Boston. We've got about 18 authors (although not that many books) represented, and I've been having the time of my life. What's amazing at these sessions is...
Okay, so it's hard to write the accent of that crazy minister in The Princess Bride, but hopefully you get the idea. Anyway, I'm writing from a hotel in Boston. In just about an hour, we'll start one of our...
We've rearranged our homepage and added a blog for the Head First team. Tell us what you think at talkback@headfirstlabs.com....
This month's Wired has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks, whose new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is a series of case studies that explore the role music plays in our mental lives. One of the things...
So we're working on Science and Math titles to branch out the Head First Family. Look for our first offerings there starting next year...and no I'm not going to be overly specific about when next year. One of the places...
So did anyone else happen to see the recent article in the NY Times Magazine about Re-engineering Engineering? The article about the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA contrasts their novel yet successful approach to teaching against...
One of the most common emails we get around here at Head First is the "Will you please publish Head First XXX?" Usually, there are little touches of individuality sprinkled in with these requests... maudlin stories about a child who...
