All the wrong things

Last year, while attending a seminar at Seth's office, we were talking about his book Survival is not enough, I remember that he mentioned that he was disappointed by the response to it. It wasn't my favourite, and after reading this great post, I think I understand why. Here's an excerpt:

We had a Java course at Sun where one of the early exercises was on the looping constructs of the language. But the exercise itself was a task that, among other things, involved converting newtons to kilograms. The scenario was some kind of package shipping system, or something like that. Of course what happened is that when the students got to that exercise, they focused their brain on the whole newton-to-kilogram thing, and struggled with understanding the shipping domain. In other words, they were thinking about the wrong things. All we wanted them to do at that point in the course was understand the basics of looping. But the exercise added so much cognitive overhead that looping was the last thing they were thinking about.

The book had great ideas, I guess I just missed them while focussing on the wrong things (the complex analogy).

I think Seth has realised this too...!