On 16 Oct 2006, at 10:24, Rimantas L. 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:
Creating Passionate Users: January 2005
your_users_brai.html
Précis: 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.
Creating Passionate Users: October 2005
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 P.'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