Dave Wood

Wanted to take a quick moment to let folks who might be interested know that I am no longer involved with the Head First OOA&D book. After 2 years of work, my book was rather suddenly canned. I don't want to turn this into a ranting post, so I'll leave it at that.

As I understand it, Brett McLaughlin is now writing a book with the same title with help from a couple OO experts. I have not seen a Table of Contents for this book, so it's probably best to disregard any of my past posts regarding the content of the book. I'm sure Bert or Brett will provide more information on the new book as it becomes available.

Anyone who is expecting a free copy from the cover model contest should probably contact Brett to make sure you still get your book once it comes out.

Thanks to all who expressed interest in the book and especially to those who participated in the cover model contest.

Thanks for that link. :-)

I'm sure she would have been happier on the HFOO cover, but it's good to see that the fine folks north of the border are taking care of her.

-dave

YJ,

Thanks for your interest. There's been a bit of a delay with HFOO as more people have become involved recently. We're working to make sure the book includes the right material and is the best that it can be. I'm actually meeting with some of the folks from O'Reilly to discuss some details next week at JavaOne. We should be putting a final schedule in place soon. Right now, Amazon (HERE) shows September 1 as the release date. I'm still hoping it will be ready before that. We'll see...!

Thanks,
Dave

Originally posted by Mike Himstead:
Hi,

I'm a little bit confused about a specific exercise regarding the "Least Knowledge" design principle. First of all, I do know what the principle means (I think ), what gives me a headache is one of the "Sharpen your pencil" tasks where one is asked to name classes that violate against the above principle. The classes are both called "House". While I understand the first issues (which is more or less the same mentioned in the chapter) the remarks about the second House class at the solutions page (page 272) puzzles me. My impression is that indeed nothing substantial did change, it looks more like "hacking our way around the principle".

Could anyone shed some light on this?

Mike,

I think you and the authors agree. My interpretation of the comments in the solution is that they are saying "yeah, technically this no longer violates the PoLK (a.k.a. Law of Demeter), but all we really did was hack around the principle." In other words, it's really no better than it was before...just "fixed" on a technicality.

-dave

Thanks Barbara. Yep, the new cover was released on ora.com today.

You can see it HERE as well.

-dave

Originally posted by Barbara Norway:
Will the reason the "pink girl" cover was vetoed ever be divulged? Just curious. Guess it wouldn't be the biker couple that made the cut....oh, wait, that was another book cover contest wasn't it? Do we really have to wait until the book is published to see the replacement cover model?

Honestly, I don't think people would have just seen "pink girl" as just an object. But, even if a brown paper bag is on the cover, the contents will be the reward.

Hi Barbara,

I don't know the exact details around pink girl's demise, but I'm pretty sure it had to do with the "object" issue you mentioned.

I don't think you'll have to wait until the book is published, but I haven't heard a date for the new cover yet. I'm hoping (this is just me thinking out load...haven't confirmed this with O'Reilly yet) that the new cover will at least be ready in time for JavaOne as I'd like to have some little promos with the new cover to give out there. Again, I'm not saying this will happen, just hoping! :-)

-dave

Why do you think it's a better title?

Personally, I have somewhat of a dislike for the term "OOA". And I expected your book to also be about object oriented coding. Isn't it?


YES!!!

The book definitely includes programming techniques. I think you can argue that there's a lot of overlap between design and implementation. But there are definitely some implementation-specific parts of the book -- most notably a rather long chapter on refactoring (and lots of code scattered throughout the rest of the book as well, of course).

I guess the reason I like this title slightly better stems from the fact that I was just never crazy about the word "Objects" by itself. It just didn't feel right (not much of an explanation, is it?).

But please rest assured that there's no shortage of code in this book!


"Head First Objects" sounded refreshingly straight forward, simple and honest to me, in a way that the new title spectacularly manages to fail in.

Ouch.

But well, it's your book, and it's the content that is important. I'm just a little bit frustrated by seeing what I feel is another book falling pray to buzzword fad...


I'm not sure I agree that Analysis and Design are exactly buzzwords. Now if we had changed the title to something like Head First Agile, Open-Source, Object-Oriented Analysis & Design with UML, Design Patterns, AJAX, Ruby, Web 2.0 and a dash of LAMP, then I could understand your buzzword argument. :-)

Honestly, I think O'Reilly's goal was really just to provide a more descriptive title. Hopefully we've accomplished that.

Thanks for your interest.

-Dave
[ April 08, 2006: Message edited by: Dave Wood ]

A quick update on the Head First Objects cover model contest:

In a surprisingly open-minded decision, executives at O'Reilly have decided to spice up the cover of Head First Objects. They have somehow managed to obtain a picture of our chosen cover model (pink girl) sans clothing! The pose is roughly the same as the original...only the clothing has been, uhh, changed. As far as I know, no decision has yet been made as to whether or not black bars will be placed over certain parts of the cover. I wanted to let everyone know before the new cover appears on the Amazon and O'Reilly websites. I hope none of you who voted for Pink Girl will be upset by the change...I realize this isn't exactly what you had voted for.

Please click here for more information!

Thanks for listening.

-dave

While it would seem logical (IMHO) for the operation names to be in italics, they are not supposed to be.

Wow, it said MARCH first? That's really odd...I don't think O'Reilly ever published a date like that. The date I'm hoping for is the date currently shown on Amazon -- May 1. It should be close to that if things go according to plan from here on out.

Just thought I'd share the news that the HFO cover is now online at Amazon.

Thanks once again to everyone who participated in the cover model contest!

CLICK HERE!

-dave

I was worried for a second that there was a black-market copy of my book out on the internet already!

As for the compiler warning...it sounds like you've got the 1st edition of HF Java which was written before Java 5 was released. But you're using Java 5 to compile. This should be fine, but you'll get those warnings as a result of using the pre-generics collections (generics were introduced in Java 5).

HTH,
-Dave

Originally posted by Bob Beerbower:
Dave, will any UML modeling tools be needed to follow along with the book. If so are there any, preferably free ware ones that you suggest.

Bob,

You definitely don't need to have a UML tool to follow along -- you can do anything you need to do with a pencil...but it certainly wouldn't hurt either. You might want to check out Jude.

Thanks for you interest in (and pre-order of!) the book.

-dave

Originally posted by Chengwei Lee:
Congrats to all the winners!

Dave, is there an estimated date the book would be hit the shelves?

I'm shooting for early May. Wish me luck!!!

I would consider reading Head First Servlets & JSP as well as perhaps Core J2EE Patterns (you might want to flip through this one first and make sure it feels like it's at an appropriate level...it's possible that it assumes too much knowledge to be useful for you right now, but I'm not sure).

HTH,
-Dave