I've been a reader and fan of the Creating Passionate Users blog for a while. Thru their writing I had a strong sense that they where interested in design and learning but I had never really hunt out any information on what exactly do they do. They write a series of technical books called the "Head First" series. I don't actually own a copy of one their books yet, so I don't know if I'm really in a position where I'm able to comment on them. What I have done is downloaded a somes copy of sample chapters as .pdf's. My first reaction was "I wish I had seen these when I was working on ID project last year". They are a really great example of a re-working of the standards ways to deal with technical information in a print form. I feel inspired about the whole area of technical teaching again because of them !!!!!
Why are they different ? they are visual and use lots of stories about real uses of things, quite often these stories are debates about different viewpoints and different ways of doing things. There is lots of flow charts, lots of photographs with captions that are sort of funny in really unpolished way. The informations is applied, situation, vague but clear, and visual. All things most technical books are not. These books look like a major break thru in the area of technical books !!!!
I have their next book on pre-order from Amazon and I'm looking forward to reading it.
Posted by robin at April 16, 2005 03:21 PM