How did you get from being a game developer to being a writer?

When the bubble burst and I finally got laid off, well, I figured I might as well use that opportunity to apply the research and principles I'd been studying for so long and write a brain-friendly Java book - the book I had wanted when I was trying to learn Java.

What prompted you to start the Head First series of books?

My partner Bert Bates and I were daydreaming-turned-brainstorming about what it would be like if we could design a brain-friendly user-experience with absolutely no concern for publishing templates, style-guides, etc. We said, 'If our only constraint is that the experience must be delivered in a flat, 2D printed book, what could we do?'

Head First was one possible implementation, and we presented it to two other major publishers before taking it to Tim O'Reilly. Today, Tim likes to thank those other two publishers for making a poor decision. Nearly everyone but Tim O'Reilly and our original editor at O'Reilly thought it was the most horrible thing they'd ever seen.

Even the bookstores were very reluctant to stock them at first.

Fortunately, we had a great Java community who embraced the book and began talking about it almost immediately, and to nearly everyone's shock - it became the #1 bestselling Java book, and still is.

What do you hope the books will achieve?

Four things:

1) We want reader/learners to have a better learning experience - one where they aren't made to feel stupid, but where nothing is dumbed down. I want readers to feel like we care about the quality of their time, by making it more enjoyable.

2) We want teachers to begin to see that there are other ways to teach technical topics that can be more engaging and interesting and fun and more effective (actually, more effective BECAUSE it is more engaging, interesting, and fun - all things that keep the brain paying attention to give the learning a better chance of happening).

3) We want to raise awareness about brain-friendly principles, and hope to see more people starting to care about it - and do something about it - whether in product manuals, books, or anything else where we want to communicate a message.

4) We want people to understand more about how they learn and remember, so that they can improve their own learning experience even in the face of very brain-UNfriendly materials.

Most of us try to communicate by talking to the person's mind, when we really need to be talking to their brain.

You have been quite an active advocate of Java, having written "Head First Java" and founded javaranch.com. Why do you focus on Java instead of other languages?

I just fell in love with Java - probably because I hated C++, and Java was more fun. I thought it would be a great language for people to learn programming and especially object-oriented programming. And later I went to work for Sun, so I was just very involved with it. Also, as it became so popular, there was a much greater opportunity for teaching it than with virtually any other language. But the longer I'm out of Sun, the more I'm starting to look at other languages, especially Ruby. :)