O’Reilly has launched a new series of books called Head First. The first (and so far only) book in the series is Head First Java, which I picked up a few days ago. The interesting thing about the series is that it’s so un-O’Reilly like, at least at first glance - but the even more interesting thing is that it’s actually not as weird as it looks. See, the thing about the Head First books is that they’re full of goofy illustrations and programming puzzles and the whole thing comes off looking just a smidge sillier than you’d expect from the same people who did Unix Power Tools. However, while it may look like it should be called U CAN LEARN JAVA, it’s actually quite a solid tutorial. The series came out of an attempt to integrate “the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology” - which is to say it’s trying to actually teach you Java, rather than trying to act as a Java reference (or whatever). The style of the book struck me as very like something you’d get in an actual classroom environment, which I’m sure isn’t a coincidence. The press release promises that readers with some existing programming experience will “learn everything from fundamentals to advanced topics, including threads, network sockets, and distributed programming with RMI. More importantly, they’ll learn how to think like object-oriented developers. They won’t just be reading and solving puzzles - they’ll be writing real Java, and plenty of it.”

But does it work? I can’t say for sure yet - I’ve only read the first bit, but I found the premise of the series intriguing. I’ve got a year of C programming under my belt and I’m comfortable with scripting languages like PHP and Perl, but Java will be my first all-out object oriented programming language. I’m getting a bit of a head start for a class I’ll be taking next semester. I think the book will probably prove to be pretty useful, but we’ll see.