Can someone here speak to the quality of this series?

They look like they're in a genre of book that I've struggled to see the case for in tech—the "for dummies" book. Culturally, our communities tend to produce lots of useful tutorials and documentation that's available publicly for free, so I've never been sure how beginner books like this find a market.

So I'm wondering if anyone who knows these books can recommend them over the free alternatives: would anything in this bundle be worth getting for a relatively experienced engineer? Is there anything worth recommending to a friend who's just getting started?

I used head first in college and honestly I'm not a fan of the style. It doesn't take itself seriously and I don't think the writing is necessarily high caliber. Head First is like the mcdonalds of tech books. You can be sure that each one will be ok at teaching you something about the topic but in each field, you can find the best book to teach you but it'll be by a variety of different authers.

So if you like reading and want a crash course on a bunch of frameworks, languages, etc, I'd buy the series. If you want to deep dive into something, look for the specialist author in that framework, language, etc.

That said, head first design patterns saved my bacon when I was studying for my first job out of college

I am a fan of the style. While not all of it was useful, in middle school I self-studied Java and the first book I used was Java for Everyone by Horstmann but this was what I used afterwards. The unseriousness of the writing style makes it easier to digest information and I felt it had a wide scope of information (IIRC, it covered servlets, Swing, networking, and multithreading).

I read Head First Design Patterns years and years ago. I'm a fan of the series. It's less for dummies and more using ideas from psychology to help you learn the material. I'll forever recall the power and conciseness of the Decorator pattern for computing the price of coffee drinks when there are as many variations as there are people. Starbuzz...

From my memory banks after close to 20 years:

    SoyDecorator: CoffeeDecorator {
        price: Cents { price + 90¢ } // Soy adds 90 cents to the price
    }

Edit: My regret is lending it to someone and never getting it back. I believe I might get this bundle.

Great for folks who aren’t “interested” in the topics. If you have drive to study it yourself, you likely don’t need these.

They use some great pedagogy for folks who might have difficulty in keeping their attention on the topic. Or at least the ones I have read.

I read the design pattern book a long time ago and it was interesting, but it was more of an introduction to the topic. An experienced engineer can get the same content from Wikipedia, you’ll only miss the funny pictures and the "tutorial format." I could recommend the books to a beginner though especially at that price.

When I started, I preferred books like those ones because there was too many tutorials all over the place, and choosing was a bit confusing. I guess I would buy that if I was a beginner again.

Same here. When I first started learning design patterns during the starting of my career, this book made the concepts "click". Nowadays I rarely refer it but it was something that explained some of the patterns with better examples.

I first learned programming from a "C++ For Dummies" book my parents bought me. I wasn't familiar enough with the subject to find something reliable online and there were no classes on programming at my school. It ended up being a great starting point for a total novice.

In 2008, I learned enough Java from HFJ to pass an interview and do well in the subsequent job.

I generally like their approach.

I enjoyed Head First C and still highly recommend it to newbies.

They're not for me. In other words, your mileage may vary

Its one of the best IT book series in the history.