And now for a brief word from my sponsor…

Just kidding about the sponsorship, but oh-so-serious about the brevity. I’m currently learning C# to complement my VB.NET skills, so I’m dedicating my non-wife, non-twitter, non-work time an hour per day to the task. While I already have a couple of books on the subject, they are a bit on the dry side. So, in the spirit of livening up my educational endeavor, I discovered and purchased Head First C# by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene. The Head First book series, published by O’Reilly, is similar in premise to the Dummies and Idiots and Absolute Beginners books (oh my!), but is far superior to them in execution. Here’s my perspective on why:

1) Pretty pictures. Yes, all of the other series have illustrations and screen shots, but the Head First C# book kicks things up to an entirely different level. It’s the first technical book I’m willing to place on my coffee table for all my non-developer friends to flip through when they’re over for dinner. Judging from what I’ve seen of the other books, this feeling is common for all books in the series.

2) Keeps my attention. The book is funny, entertaining, and educational all at the same time. The content isn’t watered down as it is in the other series. I greatly respect the infortainment as a seasoned developer who’s branching out into other languages at the behest of friends and recruiters. I don’t feel like an idiot or a dummy when I’m reading HF C# because the authors treat me, their audience, with respect. Double kudos for making me feel like a genius upon placing a picture box control on the form and tying it to a messsage box.

3) Finally, the educational content is open-ended. Like any good learning resource, the book raises topics of interest for future study and creates many deeper questions for each simple one it answers. No fluff here, folks. Reminds me of my college experience: I walked in knowing everything, and walked out realizing I knew practically nothing.

So that’s it for my brief interruption of the irregularly-scheduled programming going on here at Idea Maven. You’ll be glad to know that blogging is now a priority for me as I plan commitments each week. I’ve even created a shiny new notebook in OneNote just for the blog.

P.S. I’m testing Zemanta’s Firefox plug-in for the next few posts to see it work in action. Zemanta is a tool that suggests content, links, and tags for your posts as you type them. It’s fun, free, and oh-so Web 2.0! I highly recommend you give it a whirl.