Meet your author

Brett McLaughlin

Brett is a guitar player who is still struggling with the realization that you can't pay the bills if you're into acoustic fingerstyle blues and jazz, and high-end custom instruments. He's just recently discovered, to his delight, that writing books that help people become better programmers does pay the bills. He's very happy about this, as are his wife Leigh, and his young kids, Dean and Robbie.

Before Brett wandered into Head First land, he developed enterprise Java applications for Nextel Communications and Allegiance Telecom. When that became fairly mundane, Brett took on application servers, working on the internals of the Lutris Enhydra servlet engine and EJB container. Along the way, Brett got hooked on open source software, and helped found several cool programming tools, like Jakarta Turbine and JDOM.

When Lutris folded, Brett decided to take on writing and editing full-time, and has been an editor at O'Reilly Media, Inc., ever since. Now that he's found the Head First series, he doesn't plan on ever going back to a "normal" career again. Brett manages the bestselling Head First series, and writes Head First and Head Rush books on the side.

In addition to his work on Head First, Brett's a bestselling author, and has written Java and XML, Java 5.0: A Developer's Notebook, Home Theater Hacks, Java and XML Data Binding, and Building Java Enterprise Applications, Volume I. As if that's not enough, by the time you've got this book in your hands, Brett will probably have already started his next Head First book... but that's still a bit of a secret, so we'll tell you more on that later.

Write to him at [e-mail] or visit him online at http://www.newInstance.com. If Brett's not teaching his kids to play an instrument or watching "24" or "Arrested Development" with his wife, he'll probably answer you pretty quickly.

That's actually Bert Bates's guitar... Bert is one of the Head First series creators.

Thanks to Harold Davis, another HF author, for the great pic.