This slide show, on slide 8, talks about 4 different kinds of fun: hard fun, easy fun, serious fun, and people fun.

Most of the things you enjoy doing probably fall into one of those categories:

• Hard fun: trying to solve a difficult challenge, win against the odds, beat an opponent.
• Easy fun: taking a walk in the country, having a warm bath -- what you might think of as "just nice".
  
• Serious fun: intellectually stimulating but not challenging. Browsing Wikipedia is fun because you learn stuff... it's not challenging, but it is intellectual.
  
• People fun: getting to know people better, doing things together.

How can you build these into a tech book?

• Give readers hard fun by setting them a task that is just out of their reach, but will be rewarding if they make it.
• Give readers easy fun by including attractive pictures, screenshots, cartoons, and jokes (Dummies are great at putting "easy fun" into their books). Include quizzes that are nice and easy.
  
• Give readers serious fun with lots of intellectual stimulation and "big ideas". One of the things I find more "serious fun" than anything is suddenly understanding something more clearly than I used to. Try to bring your readers to that moment in your books. Talking about things that are slightly out of scope, but still interesting, is another form of serious fun.
  
• Give readers people fun by putting something of yourself into a book and letting them get to know you a bit.

What sort of ways do you wish authors would put more fun into their tech books?