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The Caption Contest deadline is approaching! If you're familiar with Head First books, you know each chapter starts with a picture and caption like this. Send us your suggestions for amusing or educational Head First-related captions by the end of April and we'll enter you in a drawing to win $200 of O'Reilly products. We'll announce the winner in our May newsletter, so stay tuned!

Head First books cover a lot of ground. We take you from someone who may have never seen the technology in question before to someone who can actually do something real (and cool!) with it. You can build a real web site at the end of Head First HTML, you can code an entire arcade game at the end of Head First C#, and so on.

At the same time, because we know how your brain works, we don't try to cover everything. You don't need to know every obscure JavaScript method before you can code a blog site, and you don't need to know every design pattern before you can start using them. More importantly, if you bothered memorizing all of them you wouldn't have enough brain energy left for the good stuff! We know you're smart—you can find the references you need. What's important is teaching you how to use them once you find them.

But sometimes you need to know something before you get started, and we don't tell you. Either because a lot of our readers probably already know, and we don't want to bore them, or because the material would span a lot of our books and it seems like cheating if we just copy it over and over again. Things like:

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