Head First Books From O'Reilly
Book Review

By Dale Farris, Reviews Coordinator Golden Triangle PC Club April 2009 Overview The O'Reilly Media folks, known for so long for their extensive collection of always dependable information technology books has now expanded even further with their exciting new series of dynamic titles in their Head First series of books. These wonderful learning tools cover all sorts of interesting areas of topics, and each book is filled with helpful exercises and tons of illustrations and drawings. These Head First books implement an exciting strategy that is designed to enhance the learning process. Anyone who has ever experienced the drudgery of bad instruction or bad teaching knows just how important it is that a learner be actively involved in their own learning process. The Head First books are all organized and structured around some sound principles about how people learn. So what does it take to learn something? First, you have to get it, then make sure you don't forget it. It's not about pushing facts into your head. Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. Head First books know what turns your brain on. Head First Learning Principles Make it visual Images are far more memorable than words alone, and make learning much more effective (up to 89% improvement in recall and transfer studies). It also makes things more understandable. Put the words within or near the graphics they relate to, rather than on the bottom or on another page, and learners will be up to twice as likely to solve problems related to the content. Use a conversational and personalized style In recent studies, students performed up to 40% better on post-learning tests if the content spoke directly to the reader, using a first-person, conversational style rather than taking a formal tone. Tell stories instead of lecturing. Use casual language. Don't take yourself too seriously. Which would you pay more attention to: a stimulating dinner party companion, or a lecture? Get the learner to think more deeply In other words, unless you actively flex your neurons, nothing much happens in your head. A reader has to be motivated, engaged, curious, and inspired to solve problems, draw conclusions, and generate new knowledge. And for that, you need challenges, exercises, and thought-provoking questions, and activities that involve both sides of the brain and multiple senses. Get—and keep—the reader's attention We've all had the "I really want to learn this but I can't stay awake past page one" experience. Your brain pays attention to things that are out of the ordinary, interesting, strange, eye-catching, unexpected. Learning a new, tough, technical topic doesn't have to be boring. Your brain will learn much more quickly if it's not. Touch their emotions We now know that your ability to remember something is largely dependent on its emotional content. You remember what you care about. You remember when you feel something. No, we're not talking heart-wrenching stories about a boy and his dog. We're talking emotions like surprise, curiosity, fun, "what the...?" , and the feeling of "I Rule!" that comes when you solve a puzzle, learn something everybody else thinks is hard, or realize you know something that "I'm more technical than thou" Bob from engineering doesn't. How The Books Work All the Head First books are similarly designed and structured, each around its own identified subject area. In effect, the books provide an immersive learning experience, just minus the teacher and the formal, in-class structure that typically defines the routine of education. Of course, when you consider that trying to learn something on your own, via educational material in a book, without the classroom experience of a teacher, other students, and the give-and-take of regular student-teacher question-and-answer sessions, then you obviously have a situation in which the expectations for a single book become quite significant. Usually, reading through a book represents an additional learning step that students can do in order to supplement their formalized learning experience in a classroom. However, if you remove the teacher, the classroom, and all the other students, but still expect the same level of learning from working with a book, you begin to appreciate just how difficult it is to design any book that can complement these other teaching methodologies and result in a similar level of learning and retention for the individual reading the book. This is exactly what challenges these marvelous Head First learning tools. So, what does your brain do with all the routine, ordinary, normal things you encounter? Everything it can to stop them from interfering with the brain's real job — recording things that matter. It doesn't bother saving the boring things; they never make it past the "this is obviously not important" filter. How does your brain know what's important? Suppose you're out for a day hike and a tiger jumps in front of you, what happens inside your head and body? Neurons fire. Emotions crank up. Chemicals surge. And that's how your brain knows... This must be important! Don't forget it! But imagine you're at home, or in a library. It's a safe, warm, tiger-free zone. You're studying. Getting ready for an exam. Or trying to learn some tough technical topic your boss thinks will take a week, ten days at the most. Just one problem. Your brain's trying to do you a big favor. It's trying to make sure that this obviously non-important content doesn't clutter up scarce resources. Resources that are better spent storing the really big things. Like tigers. Like the danger of fire. Like how you should never have posted those "party" photos on your Facebook page. And there's no simple way to tell your brain, "Hey brain, thank you very much, but no matter how dull this book is, and how little I'm registering on the emotional Richter scale right now, I really do want you to keep this stuff around." Metacognition: thinking about thinking If you really want to learn, and you want to learn more quickly and more deeply, pay attention to how you pay attention. Think about how you think. Learn how you learn. Most of us did not take courses on metacognition or learning theory when we were growing up. We were expected to learn, but rarely taught to learn. But we assume that if you're holding a Head First book, you really want to learn what's inside it. And you probably don't want to spend a lot of time. If you want to use what you read in this book, you need to remember what you read. And for that, you've got to understand it. To get the most from this book, or any book or learning experience, take responsibility for your brain. Your brain on this content. The trick is to get your brain to see the new material you're learning as Really Important. Crucial to your well-being. As important as a tiger. Otherwise, you're in for a constant battle, with your brain doing its best to keep the new content from sticking. So just how DO you get your brain to treat the subject like it was a hungry tiger? There's the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. The slow way is about sheer repetition. You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics if you keep pounding the same thing into your brain. With enough repetition, your brain says, "This doesn't feel important to him, but he keeps looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be." The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. The things on the previous page are a big part of the solution, and they're all things that have been proven to help your brain work in your favor. For example, studies show that putting words within the pictures they describe (as opposed to somewhere else in the page, like a caption or in the body text) causes your brain to try to makes sense of how the words and picture relate, and this causes more neurons to fire. More neurons firing = more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to, and possibly recording. A conversational style helps because people tend to pay more attention when they perceive that they're in a conversation, since they're expected to follow along and hold up their end. The amazing thing is, your brain doesn't necessarily care that the "conversation" is between you and a book! On the other hand, if the writing style is formal and dry, your brain perceives it the same way you experience being lectured to while sitting in a roomful of passive attendees. No need to stay awake. But pictures and conversational style are just the beginning. Here's what happens in a Head First book. They use pictures, because your brain is tuned for visuals, not text. As far as your brain's concerned, a picture really is worth a thousand words. And when text and pictures work together, we embedded the text in the pictures because your brain works more effectively when the text is within the thing the text refers to, as opposed to in a caption or buried in the text somewhere. They use redundancy, saying the same thing in different ways and with different media types, and multiple senses, to increase the chance that the content gets coded into more than one area of your brain. They use concepts and pictures in unexpected ways because your brain is tuned for novelty, and we use pictures and ideas with at least some emotional content, because your brain is tuned to pay attention to the biochemistry of emotions. That which causes you to feel something is more likely to be remembered, even if that feeling is nothing more than a little humor, surprise, or interest. They use a personalized, conversational style, because your brain is tuned to pay more attention when it believes you're in a conversation than if it thinks you're passively listening to a presentation. Your brain does this even when you're reading. They include many activities, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember more when you do things than when you read about things. And we make the exercises challenging-yet-do-able, because that's what most people prefer. They use multiple learning styles, because you might prefer step-by-step procedures, while someone else wants to understand the big picture first, and someone else just wants to see an example. But regardless of your own learning preference, everyone benefits from seeing the same content represented in multiple ways. They include content for both sides of your brain, because the more of your brain you engage, the more likely you are to learn and remember, and the longer you can stay focused. Since working one side of the brain often means giving the other side a chance to rest, you can be more productive at learning for a longer period of time. And they include stories and exercises that present more than one point of view, because your brain is tuned to learn more deeply when it's forced to make evaluations and judgments. They include challenges, with exercises, and by asking questions that don't always have a straight answer, because your brain is tuned to learn and remember when it has to work at something. Think about it—you can't get your body in shape just by watching people at the gym. But we did our best to make sure that when you're working hard, it's on the right things. That you're not spending one extra dendrite processing a hard-to-understand example, or parsing difficult, jargon-laden, or overly terse text. They use people. In stories, examples, pictures, etc., because, well, because you're a person. And your brain pays more attention to people than it does to things. Other stuff you should know This is a learning experience, not a reference book. They deliberately stripped out everything that might get in the way of learning whatever it is we're working on at that point in the book. And the first time through, you need to begin at the beginning, because the book makes assumptions about what you've already seen and learned. The activities are NOT optional. The exercises and activities are not add-ons; they're part of the core content of the book. Some of them are to help with memory, some for understanding, and some to help you apply what you've learned. Don't skip the written problems. The pool puzzles are the only things you don't have to do, but they're good for giving your brain a chance to think about twisty little logic puzzles. The redundancy is intentional and important. One distinct difference in a Head First book is that we want you to really get it. And they want you to finish the book remembering what you've learned. Most reference books don't have retention and recall as a goal, but this book is about learning, so you'll see some of the same concepts come up more than once. Do all the exercises! The one big assumption that we made when we wrote this book is that you want to learn what's inside it. So we know you want to get your hands dirty right away, and dig right into the code. We gave you a lot of opportunities to sharpen your skills by putting exercises in every chapter. We've labeled some of them "Do this!"—when you see that, it means that we'll walk you through all of the steps to solve a particular problem. But when you see the Exercise logo with the running shoes, then we've left a big portion of the problem up to you to solve, and we gave you the solution that we came up with. Don't be afraid to peek at the solution—it's not cheating! But you'll learn the most if you try to solve the problem first. The "Brain Power" exercises don't have answers. For some of them, there is no right answer, and for others, part of the learning experience of the Brain Power activities is for you to decide if and when your answers are right. In some of the Brain Power exercises you will find hints to point you in the right direction. Here's The Lineup So Far At the point of this review, the following are included among the many Head First titles from O'reilly. Head First Algebra By Tracey Pilone, Dan Pilone December 2008 $29.99 Head First Ajax By Rebecca Riordan July 2008 $44.99 Head First C# By Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene November 2007 $49.99 Head First Design Patterns By Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman October 2004 $44.95 Head First EJB By Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates October 2003 $44.95 Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML By Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman December 2005 $39.99 Head First Java, Second Edition By Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates February 2005 $44.95 Head First JavaScript By Michael Morrison December 2007 $39.99 Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design By Brett McLaughlin, Gary Pollice, David West November 2006 $49.99 Head First PHP & MySQL By Lynn Beighley, Michael Morrison December 2008 $44.99 Head First Physics By Heather Lang August 2008 $29.99 Head First PMP By Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene March 2007 $49.99 Head First Rails By David Griffiths December 2008 $49.99 Head First Servlets & JSP, Second Edition By Bryan Basham, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates March 2008 $49.99 Head First Software Development By Dan Pilone, Russell Miles December 2007 $49.99 Head First SQL By Lynn Beighley August 2007 $44.99 Head First Statistics By Dawn Griffiths July 2008 $34.99 Head First Web Design By Ethan Watrall, Jeff Siarto December 2008 (est.) $44.99 Head Rush Ajax By Brett McLaughlin March 2006 $39.99 Other Head First titles are expected soon. Keep checking back at O'Reilly's Head First site to find out when these new titles are available. Targeted Readers As you can see from the above variety of titles, these Head First books come in all sorts of flavors, and all are written by professionals considered experts in their fields. Each book is similarly designed around its particular subject area, filled with numerous designs, illustrations, and the all important exercises and routine work assignments that are critical to learning the material covered in the book. Each book can be considered as a superb learning tool for anyone from at least a middle-school age on up. Professionals working in the fields covered by the books will also find each book to be a superb refresher training tool, while students exploring the subject for the first time will find the books to be an excellent supplemental learning tool that will greatly aid in their effort to learn the subject. Many of the books could also be considered as the assigned textbook for many preparatory learning schools, as well as college level classes. The books have a lot of redundancy and many, many activities that also help firmly entrench the concepts into practice for the reader. As the authors say, the books are designed as a learning experience, and not a reference book, and they do strongly advise readers to start at the beginning and work their way through the material. Their emphasis is on teaching you how to handle the material, and they soundly emphasize the use of pencil and paper to be sure that you do know how to solve the practice problems. The way the books are designed and presented is very conversational and engaging, and it genuinely feels like you are having a conversation with the authors as you read through the book. Key Principle to Learning From These Books In my opinion, the key to success in learning and retaining the material in these books is the commitment of the reader to do the work the book presents. Working with these books is an experience quite different from what most readers are usually accustomed to when they pick up a book. Although the material is designed around the book format, the approach with these particular books is something entirely different from when readers choose to read other books for pleasure or even to learn something. Instead, with these Head First books, the reader will be expected to invest quite a bit of time to work with the book and complete the exercises included in the books. The books are not necessarily designed to be a success just by casually reading through the material. While some readers already well versed and thoroughly experienced with the subject of the books may be able to scan through the book to refresh what they already know very well, in most other cases, the books have been designed to help other readers needing help with the subject matter, or who may be learning about the subject matter for the first time. In these cases, these books will definitely help these readers, IF they choose to invest their time in actually working hard on the book's many valuable exercises. About the Publisher Founded in 1978, O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, research, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and galvanizing their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism. Publisher of the iconic "animal books" for software developers, creator of the first commercial website (GNN), organizer of the summit meeting that gave the open source software movement its name, and prime instigator of the DIY revolution through its Make magazine, O'Reilly continues to concoct new ways to connect people with the information they need. O'Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. Long the information source of choice for technologists, the company now also delivers the knowledge of expert early adopters to everyday computer users. Whether it's delivered in print, online, or in person, everything O'Reilly produces reflects the company's unshakeable belief in the power of information to spur innovation. 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