From: Paul Lynch <paul@...>
Date: 2006-10-16T22:32:25+09:00
Subject: Re: What books to buy?

On 16 Oct 2006, at 10:24, Rimantas Liubertas wrote:

> <...>
>> But on the negative side are the use of juvenile speech,  
>> anthropomorphising of concepts (interviews with design patterns,  
>> for example), silly pictures, etc.
>
> There is a sound reason for this:
>
> http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/01/ 
> your_users_brai.html

Pr�cis: tutorials should be written in a conversational, rather than  
a "formal" style.

One thing from this article that surprised me: "Most importantly,  
ignore the advice your high school writing teacher gave you--that you  
must never "write the way you talk.""  Funny, the advice MY high  
school teacher gave me was to always write the way that I talk.  Must  
be a difference between the American public school system and the  
British "public" school system.

> http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/10/ 
> words_pictures_.html

My personal reinterpretation of this: tutorial information should be  
conveyed in multiple media for best comprehension.  Words and  
pictures to illustrate every concept is the example in the article,  
but I'd expand it to ALL media; the more the merrier.

Moving on from that, both articles are fine sources of information  
which I thoroughly agree with.  However, they don't apply to the  
criticisms quoted above.  The Head First books do not use a normal  
conversational style - they descend into a "jive talk" version of  
English, which certainly isn't how I, or anyone else I know, talks.

Secondly, illustrations are fine.  In fact, they are excellent.  But  
take a look at the proportion of "silly pictures", mostly faked up  
photos of people in 50s style clothes, that don't actually apply to  
any of the points being made.  Irrelevant pictures don't count; they  
just bulk out the page count, and, frankly, I'd far rather a slim  
tutorial book than a fat one that covers exactly the same ground.

> "Head First" books make little sense if you are already an expert  
> in the field but when you try to learn something new the age,  
> professional status and college degree just doesn't matter - we all  
> have legacy brains.

I have no idea what you think you mean by "legacy brains" - but we  
sure all learn the same way.  My criticism is that the Head First  
house style is aimed at some notion of how a teenager talks and  
behaves, which doesn't correspond to reality, and doesn't work  
outside of that notional teenagers cultural background.  Furthermore,  
it gets in the way of the typical post-college user, because it poses  
exactly the same barriers against assimilation as Kathy rails against  
in Sun's formal reference books.

As Kathy says in one of the articles, just because the authors of a  
book were responsible for Microsoft Bob doesn't mean that their ideas  
are bad :-).

> However, this is off-topic already, so I'll stop here :)

This isn't really off-topic: the disparaging of Head First was made  
in parallel with some expressed desires to improve Chris Pine's  
introductory work, and the two topic cross over.  "Learning to  
Program" needs exactly the improvements that Kathy is talking about,  
as it lack illustration, examples and exercises (as well as more  
detailed criticisms that can be made of the flow and the programming  
style used) - but the world doesn't need a "Head First Ruby".

Paul