O’Reilly has announced the release of “Head First Java” (US$39.95), co-authored by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. The book combines “humor, puzzles, strong visuals, and a friendly conversational style… to accelerate learning by engaging the reader’s entire mind in an active learning process. Despite its playful appearance, ‘Head First Java’ is serious stuff — a complete introduction to object-oriented (OO) programming and Java. Readers will learn everything from fundamentals to advanced topics, including threads, network sockets, and distributed programming with RMI. More importantly, they’ll learn how to think like object-oriented developers.”