Human-Computer Interaction Books

The book itself is the only one on this matter. It is well written with tons of examples. I would consider this book as a must for those who are writing the
Cross-Platform GUI using open source libs. The book came very fast and in a perfect condition. I would highly recommend buying books from this seller.

This book is very complete.
It explains the basics and all the way through the most complex capabilities of the wxWidgets library.
The CD included contains tons of useful code and additional utilities.
Very good product - I recommend it.

The definitive book on wxWindows (now wxWidgets). This can be found online but I do like the printed books better.

Covers mostly everything a novice (to wxWidgets) needs to get started on multi-platform applications.

As a book for learning a topic, this one is wanting. It doesn't develop the numerous code snippets into whole programs, leaving the reader uncertain how they actually work. It states much, explains little. As others have pointed out, there are many books on related programming topics that do a good job of bringing a novice or modestly experienced programmer up to speed - one must be a well versed programmer to benefit from this book.

Good reference books seem to be hard to come by lately. Good reference books give you insight and a fuller understanding of the inner workings of whatever their subject matter might be. This is not the case of this book.

You need "Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets" only because the standard wxWidgets documentation is so very crude (no one to blame there, except each and every one of us for not contributing better documentation) and because its source code (as well as part of the core development team, I dare add) is so unfriendly to tools like Doxygen. Smart's book is what the wxWidgets online documentation would have been in a perfect world. No more and no less. The author has done a good job compiling and explaining with sample code the basic usage of most wxWidgets components, but you will not emerge a wxWidgets guru after reading this book. For example, just half a page is dedicated to explaining the by no means trivial wxObject class.

You will be disappointed if you are expecting a mind-opening book, the likes of Petzold's classic "Programming Windows", or Prosise's "Programming MFC", or Wall's "Programming Perl" (just to name a few excellent books from a time when the pace of technology was slower and authors still had time to put together great tutorial/reference works), but having a book like this is probably better than no book at all and buying it is a way to support the project, after all.

This book isn't about "hacking your brain" at all. What it really is is an overview of neuroscience, presented as 100 different topics which talk about how the brain works. Ever wonder how our brain figures out which direction sound comes from? Or how we pick out patterns in chaos? Or how we construct our vision of the world? Not only does it explain it in a very accessible fashion, but it gives hyperlinks to things online which have mp3s or jpegs which help demonstrate the point so that you can verify for yourself that it's how it works.

I was sorely disappointed in this book--I checked it out from the local library and hoped that it would actually live up to the subtitle of including tips and tools for using my brain. It didn't; the few "tips" included were those that are found in virtually every other discussion of how to improve memory.

This book is more geared toward folks who are designing user interfaces--it talks about how the brain processes information (and thus describes ways to improve information conveyance).

It's a book very interested about language in mind and speech comprehension. I read a short comment in BBC Focus magazine and I wish to read because it's very easy to learn the misteries of mind in cognitive science applied to language and psichology.

This is a really great book. More novelty than improvement, but still great. If you're looking for something that will be useful as well as attention grabbing then look for the second edition; "Mind Performance Hacks"

Learning about the mind is okay, but I didn't learn anything that I hadn't seen in Psych 101, and a few interesting articles later on.

Calling it a "hacks" book is false advertising, at best. Should it make it to another printing, I would hope O'Reilly would rename it.

The information seemed accurate, so I'll give it that.

The essays are mostly a retelling of the history of open source software. I find it curious how much was written about Netscape, an enterprise that ultimately failed. With hindsight I would say that converting to open source is not a remedy for a poor business model. Poor, as used here, is not an absolute measure. Netscape was simply destroyed by a fierce competitor. Maybe the time was not yet ripe for open source software.

I found Tim O'Reily's concept of infoware to be very interesting. Today I would call them web applications as opposed to desktop applications not only because they are served from a web-server but also because they use the vast resources available on the web.

Brian Behlendorf comments on open source's position in the spectrum of software. It is interesting to see how this has changed over the past nine years. Initially open source was mainly infrastructure/back-end. While these areas are still predominant (LAMP), a lot of user software, specially CMS, is making a strong showing. Since these user systems are written mostly in interpreted languages like php, the question of open source, per se, becomes moot.

What is sorely missing is an economic theory of open source software. None of the authors seems familiar with the law of increasing returns which, according to Brain Arthur, is the economic law governing proprietary software. A discussion of this subject would help in developing sound business models for open source.

Although I'm not too satisfied with this book I'm ordering the sequel Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution

All the essays are well written, enjoyable, informative and a great read. Anyone interested in open source software, where S/W development might be going and Unix/Linux/GNU software in particular, should read this book. One or two essays showing their age, but still worth every penny. Buy it, read it, then encourage your friends to read it as well.

This book is an interesting window on the Open Source world. It is a strange planet with strange people. Some crazy idealist like R. Stallman (I like the guy very much), some smart and intelligent person like L. Torvald (he did a very good job with Linux). In between someone that was just in the right place at the right time, but who doesn't deserve so much space and celebrity. I am talking about a person that seems confused as the language he invented: Larry Wall. His contribution does not require further comments.

This book was the first O'Reilly book to contain essays about the concept of Open Source and was later followed by the book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. While some essays may seem similar to the latter, each of them are still fascinating and offer an insightful look into what makes Open Source work and why this phenomenon has become its own industry.

Among the essays here are included a "history" of Unix, essays about Cygnus (who offers a source code complier program) and Red Hat (who offers Linux), two businesses that sell services related to open source, an essay about the effects of releasing open source code for Netscape, one about the GNU Operating System and even one by Linux Torvals, the "father" of Linux.

What's continually fascinating to me the more I read about Open Source is the amount of time and energy others voluntarily put into an open source project to make it work that much better. Not to mention the entire "society" that is built around Open Source.

An interesting read, along with the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

This is a good idea on O'Reilly's part to try to document the history and goals of the Open Source movement, which had roots in several college campuses and research labs in the '70s and '80s, and became news in the late '90s with the popularity of Linux, Apache, and the decision of Netscape to open its browser source. The best introductory piece, however, is probably Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" which is not in this book(O'Reilly publishes it separately, but it's available free on the Web and short enough to be read in one sitting). As for this collection, I liked Robert Young's business case for distributing open source - his story of how Red Hat was launched reminds me of the Compaq tale of "three guys in a restaurant". The Apache article is also quite good, and Linus Torvalds offers a brief but interesting (and characteristically opinionated) article about how Linux evolved technically. There's also a good article discussing the various open source licenses (BSD, GPL, Netscape, etc) and what they do and don't restrict.

Others I was less impressed with. Stallman's article is predictable and self-serving. He explains how he evolved his software-as-gift philosophy but doesn't come close to terms with how the software industry can support substantial employment if all source is given away. There's yet another history of the different branches of BSD Unix. There's a breathtaking inside account of the launch of Mozilla which ends with the fancy Silicon Valley party when development has finally gotten underway. The low point is Larry Wall's "essay", which is a frankly ridiculous waste of time and print.

Although this is a mixed bag, there's enough reference material and interesting points of view to keep the book around.

This book is a page turner. The book provides a fast-paced account of spammers and spam fighters, their business practices and respective struggles online and offline. I had picked up the book, simply because I was curious about the motivations of spammers and often wondered: What kind of a person is a spammer and who would respond to those emails and actually buy from them anyway? This book can be an eye-opener and I certainly learned a lot from it. Fun side note: A lot of supporting material is available online, as the spam wars are being fought mostly online. Chances are, you'll find yourself browsing news groups and forums to research and find out more about the various people being discussed in the book. The author also provides a blog where he discusses spam and other topics close to his book.

Maybe I am being unkind with 3 stars. The prose style is good. The author has done plenty of research into the background of the spammers and anti-spammers and the book is an intereesting read.
At 300 pages (excluding intro, glossary, notes, index) it is too long. It could usefully have been trimmed to 200 pages.
Anyone wanting nitty-gritty technical detail is out of luck. There is almost none. [I suspect Inside the Spam Cartel is better from that point of view, but I have only glanced at it so far.]
The book is also unbalanced. Yes, spammers are awful. They make email hard to use (one of my email addresses is widely publicised and as a result I get over 100 spam/day, sometimes rising to two or three times that). They have almost wrecked a direct marketing tool that could have benefited consumers and producers alike. But civilised societies do not support lynch mobs etc, and if you read the book carefully, the anti-spammers often seem to break as many laws as the spammers (in a good cause, of course). I was reminded sometimes of the animal rights protesters in the UK (except that the anti-spammers have not physically attacked people or property).
Part of the problem is that the lawmakers seem to be technically inept - CAN-SPAM is not an inspiring achievement.

This is the story of spammers, and those who despise them, the anti-spammers. Basically the spammers do as they please (spam, do Joe-jobs, etc.)and enjoy their money and their power to annoy and frustrate, while the anti-spammers spend hours on-line in efforts to out the identity of the spammers. All this is good of the anti-spammers, of course if the government would get it together we wouldn't have to worry about this problem...or if people weren't so stupid as to order the stuff spammers offer.

Unfortunately, I could not muster any interest in either the spammers or anti-spammers. The spammers were, as the author stated, "arrogant" and "psychopaths," and the anti-spammers seemed quite pitiful - all wrapped up in their very time-consuming on-line battles with the disgusting spammers.

This book left me feeling as though I had eavesdropped for months on people I couldn't care less about. And although the author describes in detail the various activities that spammers engage in, it offers no help to the decent among us who would like to protect themselves from their cruel onslaught.

After reading this book I felt the need to take a shower.

The world of spam isn't for those who don't want to get their hands dirty... really dirty.

A unique look at the world of spamming, Brian McWilliams outlines what the life of a spammer is like, profiling a handful of spam magnates from the early 2000s (the book focuses on the years 2000-2004 when this was published), and the individuals that work on stopping them from achieving their #1 priority, separating you from YOUR money.

When you read 'Spam Kings' you will discover the lifestyle of a spammer and how/why so many e-mails get into your inbox every day promoting anything from viagra to pirated software and anything else inbetween. You will learn about why when you click the 'From' part of an e-mail you are not able to always determine where this message originated from, and how so many messages (hint: we're talking more than just millions) get delivered in such a little amount of time.

Before reading this book I had a general idea of the type of person that would send spam - what they might look like, how they act, the software used to push so many messages out, but what I was ignorant of was the type and amount of people out there fighting the flow of spam from getting into users email accounts. As much as there is a sect of individuals trying to get spam moved to your inbox, there is another group trying to get this email to never grace your eyes. Anti-spammers (as they are called) frequent discussion groups, contact spammers on their own, and manage lists that are used to make sure that ISPs don't allow spammers to even reach you as hard as they might try.

Brian McWilliams covers a lot of ground in this book, and it's a fascinating look at the underground world of spam. Whether you are a major or minor part of the computer world, this analysis is well worth a look to discover more about why there are so many spammers out there in cyberspace and why many of them are filthy rich.

The only complaint I might have with this book is it seems a bit too long (even at 333 pages) and the author bounces all over the place when he discusses different spammers throughout the book. I understand that he is trying to give many examples and track spammers movements all along the same timelines throughout the book, but it seemed a little too jumpy at times. Not enough so that a reader couldn't follow what was going on, but if a case study approach (chapter by chapter analysis of different spammers) was used instead, this might have been the better approach.

Still, an enlightening read and well worth the time to pick up.

**** RECOMMENDED

This is about the personal lives, and the trials and tribulations of spammers and spam fighters. A more motley crew of miscreants and their enemies would be hard to imagine.

Sickie number one would be Davis Wolfgang Hawke (aka "Bo Decker," "Michael Girdley," etc.) one-time founder and leader of his self-styled Neo-Nazi group, the Knights of Freedom. He got started in Web hustling by selling knives and Nazi paraphernalia on Ebay. When it was discovered that his birth name was Andrew Britt Greenbaum and that his father was Jewish, he quite naturally lost a lot of cache with his Neo-Nazi followers, and so he closed down his storm trooper Website and turned to spam. He discovered that he had a natural talent for writing the sort of copy that sells sex pheromones, pyramid schemes, porn, and other spam "products," and before he knew it he was hiding stashes of hundred-dollar bills all over his various digs and the nearby countryside.

Sickie number two would be Brad Bournival, Hawke's geeky chess-playing protege who made a million dollars spamming penis enlargements pills and such. Other sickies include big-timer Scott Richter of OptInRealBig who followed 9/11 and the anthrax attacks with flag and gas mask spamming, a kind of low-life huckster with a genius for turning public events into personal wealth. Also mentionable is the really sad Thomas Cowles who hustled mass mailing software but got thrown in jail for criminal contempt of court after allegedly stealing some computer equipment from South Florida spam king Eddy Marin.

The white hats include Susan "Shiksaa" Gunn, Piers "Mad Pierre" Forrest, Francis Uy, Pete Wellborn, Steve Linford and others, many of whom frequented the antispam Web newsgroup Nanae. Compromised and perhaps characteristic of a third category of spam-world denizens would be Karen Hoffman, one-time spam fighter who crossed over to the dark side to work for spammers.

What is really amazing is just how readable this book is. McWilliams has the narrative talent of a novelist, and the investigative skills of a top drawer journalist. I found this bizarre story of greed and human depravity in cyberspace as "unputdownable" as a best-selling true crime tale--which it is. This also serves as a sort of history of outline spam, chronicling the lives and times of those involved while reporting on the various measures taken by email providers and governments to combat the flood of unsolicited bulk emails.

As for the future of spam and spam-fighters, McWilliams gives this appraisal: "...the pernicious root of the spam crisis does not appear to be legislative or technological. It is human..." He adds, "The ability to move relatively incognito online may have created a perfect medium for surreptitious e-marketers...But the Internet has also engendered a corresponding segment of consumers. Call them furtive shoppers" who have a desire for stuff that needs to be delivered in plain, brown wrappers. He concludes, "...spammers sell whatever people will buy from them." (pp. 296-297)

So, the spam problem (costing the world $25-billion a year--estimate by the UN's International Telecommunications Union, p. 295) is not likely to go away until somebody changes human nature. As soon as the large ISPs such as AOL and Yahoo! find a way to filter out spam, spammers find a new way to get around their filters. Short of draconian measures, it would appear that spam at some level of annoyance will continue to be with us for years to come.

I got this book about product marketing because I wanted to gain insight on the marketing of my own product http://www.code-roller.com so I was a little frustrated by the overall direction and focus of the book which is to motivate the reader into hiring Adaptive Path. All four authors either currently work for or have recently worked for that marketing company. According to the on-line edition of the book, there are twenty eight references to Adaptive Path in the content.

While light on theory, the book does give good advice. This advice is mostly in the form of what not to do. This most probably reflects Adaptive Path's pain points in earlier engagements with customers. Don't use competition as your main driver. Don't depend on novelty. Don't get stuck on research or reporting. Don't get stuck on product design. Don't over-engineer. Don't get too confident about what you think your customers want.

If there is only one important take away from this book, then I believe that it would be this. It's all about the user experience. What you should be focusing your design efforts on is the user experience. What you should be focusing your strategy on is the user experience. The only thing you do that your customers care about is their experience of your product or service.

They heavily advocate using an Agile methodology. They agree with early prototyping, failing fast, and continuous customer involvement. They are lukewarm on the SPARC model.

'Subject to Change' is a valuable addition to the modern business person's bookshelf. I should note that this would be an especially great tool for marketers and publicists, research and development teams, as well as application developers.

The Adaptive Path team took a fungible approach to writing this book, as an organization that is interested in anticipation of the ever-changing needs of the expectations of their customers.

In the late Nineteenth century, inventions and innovations were largely based on new advances in technology available at the time. The kludgy inconvenience of these early technologies were simply 'part of the experience.' This book sites Eastman's Kodak Camera as perhaps the first example of a company having the foresight to anticipate a customer's needs. Until then, photographers were hobbyists, scientists, and tech geeks of the age. Eastman's brilliant vision of making technology more accessible to the rest of the populous with the philosophy of "You press the button, and we do the rest," was a great bridge between the customers who wanted to take photos and a company that could provide a service. That service being the development of the film, processing the plates, and mailing the finished photos to the customer.

The book uses this model to encourage shifting our traditional business mindset to anticipate our customer's needs while developing software, hardware, or other devises. By empathizing with the target audience, and my making yourself a part of the audience yourself, you may wish to create an experience for your users that has the potential to seamlessly integrate with their lives. When marketers or designers use the traditional mode--that people are sheep--without valuing the feedback of the audience, innovation will grind to a halt. I emphatically agree with the Adaptive Path on this theme. As a publicist, I value customer feedback as much as I value my own creative ideas.

Another great specimen, and perhaps a more modern one, is the iPod/iTunes Music store. The mp3 player was already invented, but Steve Jobs created the experience of browsing music and buying music for the device, anticipating the customer's needs. One could also argue that the iPhone is also the product of this school of thought, combining the need for a cell phone with the music player experience, all in one well designed device.

I have a niece with juvenile diabetes, and this book gave me a peek into the development of something that she uses every day to enjoy a happy life. There is a relatively new medical product developed called an insulin pump. I can testify that she is much happier using this pump than her previous regiment of daily shots. When developing this pump, diabetics tested a mock-up of the device, and offered feedback as to what would work for them. The developers of the pump changed the design of the belt used while swimming or in the shower, as well as other practical concerns. A side-note is that I was reading this section of the book while my nieces were happily making sandcastles and going in and out of the water! Without the user input, the device might be uncomfortable and unwieldy and certainly not easy to wear at the beach. This reminds me that the first undergarments for women were made by men, but the true innovations in practicality and comfort came when women started designing them!

In conclusion, this is a great book and I have started personally to rethink the feedback I am getting from my customers to be more empathetic. Empathizing with a person's needs in the present and the future will prove to be a better model to provide easy to use, and enriching technologies, customer service solutions, and ingenuity.

In an accessible tone, Subject to Change articulates what should now be taken for granted in product design: that products designed around real peoples' needs and desires will win over those engineered to meet theoretical expectations. Using Adaptive Path's experience as examples (and perhaps emphasising the consultancy's achievements more often than necessary), the authors make an easily-digestible case for implementing an experience design strategy in favour of blindly over-engineering complex products.

The book suggests that engineering-led product optimization improves but doesn't innovate. On the other hand, placing real customers at the center of the design process is shown as a shortcut to delivering more relevant, useful and successful products.

Adaptive Path are arguably thought leaders in this space, and the style of writing here shows their desire to advertise the company's experience. The reader is perhaps reminded too often that the successes in the examples given were due to Adaptive Path's involvement, and that adopting their processes in particular can help any product designer. This doesn't add credibility to the case studies, because someone buying an Adaptive Path book is likely to already be satisfied with the authors' credentials before reading.

Subject to Change will resonate well with designers of all disciplines, but it's perhaps other departments that would benefit the most by considering the adoption of an experience-led strategy. There may not be a great deal of new thought contained here, but as an easy-to-read introduction to the merits of customer-focussed design, Subject to Change would be a useful addition to an engineer's or product manager's bookshelf.

SUBJECT TO CHANGE: CREATING GREAT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FOR AN UNCERTAIN WORLD provides basics for designing products for web software and competitive advantage alike - but to limit it to computer collections would be a shame. It's the college-level or public library collection specializing in innovative business solutions who will find it a powerful discussion of strategy and futuristic thinking processes, packed with real-world examples.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Subject to Change presents an excellent strategic overview of new product development practices for media and physical interaction products based upon the consulting practice of Adaptive Path. It mentions, and briefly summarizes such practices as paper prototyping, persona's, wireframe mockups, storyboards and Wizard of Oz simulations. Several historical and current examples such as Apple's iPod and George Eastman's original camera are briefly highlighted. The book definitely provides a strategic overview of current product development practices, highlighting those of "Experience Design". It is most suitable as a supplement to Ulrich and Eppinger's Product Design and Development for an MBA product development course or as a stand-alone strategy guide for an Art School course in new media design. For the practitioner, this book certainly highlights modern practices of experience design and product development as they affect interaction design, industrial design, and the new media industries. However, as a strategic guide, it is lacking in the level of detail necessary for a cookbook to carry out a specific design project. Perhaps the book should be supplemented by a website with detailed examples of each of the development practices mentioned in this guide. For example, Adaptive Path, the media strategy firm whose practices are highlighted in this volume has illustrated on their own website the development methods they carried out in developing, the Aurora video prototype for a future Mozilla browser with both textual scenarios, outlines of the development effort, and several short video clips. If this brief strategy guide were supplemented with several such practice scenarios, the strategies mentioned in this book could be readily carried out by any competent practitioner.

This review is based on my experience as a new product development consultant in the Information Technology field for Arthur D. Little, Digital Equipment Corporation and several multimedia startups.

-- Ira Laefsky

This books solves a lot of arguments. When some analyst/designer/developer says "I think 'OK' buttons should be positioned on the top-left corner of each screen blah blah blah" I just point to this book and tell them to look it up in the guidelines. End of discussion. Following the guidelines keeps everyone's look-and-feel consistent, and prevents yet another analyst from writing their own "styleguide" for each project.

This book is an excellent guide for anyone involved with developing Windows applications. Basically everything in the book still applies today.

The Microsoft interface book is still practical although it is old (1995 or so). It explains the very basics of user interfaces in a few and clear words. However descriptions about technology and specifics of certain windows platform are really outdated.

This official set of guidelines for creating Windows-compliant user interfaces was published in 1995, and explains in depth then just released Windows 95. Profusely illustrated and nicely printed on a good quality paper, it seems to cover all the necessary bases on its 550+ pages. It might not be the best lecture ever -- the text is rather dry and gets boring after a while -- but for a reference book that it is, it's hard to point out any serious problems. Even when Windows 95-like interface will be long but obsolete, the book might be a joy to riffle through. International word lists, presenting Windows terms translated to 25 languages, are a nice addition.

To echo the other reviews, don't be put off because this book is now 11 years old. Almost all of the behavior defined in this text still applies to Windows XP. If you are somehow involved in UI design for desktop software, you need this book.

I was 100% satisfied with this book. It is clearly written, well organized and filled with many usefull examples of both good and bad designs. It also is very well cross referenced to other user interface design resources on every topic. In particular, it contains comprehensive reviews of other usefull books related to user interface design. I rate this as a must-have quality book.

This book is well written and contains a helpful CD with a great set of sample guidelines that acts as a terrific cheat sheet of the book's main points.

This book is a very interesting read. The author gathers a lot of information from very diverse sources and presents it in a thoughtful and well-ordered manner. This book covers a very wide range, from high-level methodologies to lower-level design advice. The sample User Interface Guidelines were particularily useful to me in getting a leg up on starting to define Guidelines for my organization.

Mr McKay knows his subject and could have written an attractive slim volume. As it is, he has given us a fat ugly one. Ironically, the worst aspect of this book is its UI and for exactly the reasons that the author is at pains to explain. The giant headings are distracting, the over printed chapter numbers, just silly, etc. To compound the irksome UI, the author insists on recycling every sentence he has written over and over again - this undoubtedly bulks out the book, but it does nothing for this user's experience.

Not to dissent, but this seems more one man's personal manifesto than a guide for making apps conform with existing Windows standards. Did Microsoft Press just farm this book out to some random writer? Not that he doesn't raise the occasional valid point, but if you're looking for Windows standards and practices, be it ui or infrastructure--or if you're looking for the results of solid research as opposed to assertions of opinion--look elsewhere.

I'm not a usability expert, and this didn't quite match up with what I hoped to get out a of class on software evaluation for librarians (but that has more to do with the professor's slant on the subject and choice of book), but the book was easy to read and I felt that it covered some good points. It is, however, starting to show its age in some of the details, like the assumption that many software users will be unfamiliar with PCs and using a mouse to interact with a PC.

If your specialty is the user interface, you need to read this book. If you are interested in developing a user interface design process, you should read this. If you are a software developer who wants to know how to build good interfaces, skip it. It is too much about perfecting the design process.

I was looking for 'use this button for x and this widget for y'. In other words, here are the rules for a good user interface. What I got was 'here is the process for studying users and their interfaces, and here is a mountain of statistics to back it up'. No fault of the author, I just mis-understood what I was getting.

Having said that, if you want to make your living studying and perfecting interface design, read this book.

If you are an experienced user interface designer who thoroughly understands what usability is about you probably don't need to read the book (although I would find it strange that you are experienced and did not read this book which is attributed to have coined the term "Usability Engineering").

So who should read the book. Everybody that is going to develop any form of software. No, it won't make you an expert, but it will get you thinking.

On the negative side, some of the examples may some be slightly old (but its a 1993 book!). Sometimes you're also going to feel that you could stress this concept in half the space. However, the information and the thought process behind the information is extremely relevant and is well-worth the effort of reading the book.

If you are new in software development this book is an absolute must. In a sense it helps you develop "a way of thinking" rather than giving any specifics.

However, if you are looking for specifics, Chapter 5 deals with usability heuristics, presenting 10 of them. When looking at the list of 10 heuristics, they may seem obvious, trivial almost. It is quite amazing, however, how often those seemingly trivial things are overlooked or ignored. Just use some programs on your PC...

I think it would be worthwhile any software developers time to read Chapter 5 and think long and hard about what is said - then go back to your software and be honest with yourself. It might be some of the best lessons you'll ever learn.

In lots of ways this book has everything that classics are made of - except occasionally the ease of reading.

The title I use is an old portuguese proverb. It is a good description of this book. In page 115 it says: "User interfaces should be simplified as much as possible,...". And then it takes almost 8 pages to explain it. Read it. His advices are pure gold. But don't build your user interface like this book was built: overcrowded with unnecessary details. There's another funny thing about this book. It's about design, mostly graphical. But doesn't talk to much about "creativity".

If his own principles had been applied to the book it could be reduced to a a few bullet points.

*the web is slow, less is more.

*tell people what a link leads too before they press it, and make sure it does.

*use standard fonts in easy to read colours.

*use standard web conventions where ever possible as they are familiar.

*check for spelling mistakes and grammar errors.

*write concisely and arrange depth of detail in hierarchies, like they do in errr reference books.

*tell the user where they are, and how they got their, um like a path prehaps.

*some people have small screens, some don't even use microsoft browsers, not everyone has the latest plug ins, allow for it.

*don't employ frustrated artists to design your site, use an engineer.

Jakob proudly states he has multiple patents in the field of usability, maybe following this book will infringe them, or maybe he just kept the good stuff for himself.

Outstanding read about the history of how some of the things we use daily were conceptualized and designed.

Moggridge interviews some of the coolest and relevant inventors of the modern (technology) era.

The book hit a dry spell toward the end but finished strong.

As a usability and design professional I found this book to be a good read on perspective, and to read the techniques and methods used to develop new things.

The book provides some good insights into the world of interaction design.
However, it's a bit boring and too much of a history lesson.

While the information provided within is a nice examination of various things previously done, the book provides little about how to go about processing or coming up with the information or general practices for doing so in your own project(s). However, if you have a generally analytical mind, you can definitely pull some of that information out of it. The few gems of knowledge as applied to products already designed are very valuable and the proper descriptions were chosen for each.

The "interviews" contained within the book are a bit too disparate for my tastes, though. There is a lack of general cohesion that causes the book to "feel" off-topic, even though it is all related. Focus seems to be lost on the underlying reason for the book (even based on the forward, description, etc.).

There's a lot there, but you're going to have to pick it out for yourself. The book definitely lacks the ability to state what the intentions of varies arguments and examinations are but what is there is valuable.

This book makes you think a lot about how interactions have been designed. It has a lot of great examples and I even picked up a few tricks on storyboarding my interactions and designs. Well done.

En este libro se revisan una serie de autores que son relevantes en el campo del diseño de interacción. Podemos encontrar desde Brenda Laurel hablando del desarrollo de juegos para niñas, hasta los creadores de Google. No es un libro que profundice en los temas, es más bién un útil panóptico del desarrollo del diseño de interacción.

Marcos Chilet
Diseño, Pontificia Universidad catolica de chile.

This book is a terribly self-indulgent view of interaction design. There is no real analysis in this book or critical thinking. It's mostly a collection of simple stories from companies or efforts that Moggridge likes. There is no real theory offered here, only anecdotes. It's also a very Silicon Valley-centric view of the world. If you are looking for a partial history of interesting "interaction" design efforts, this book may be for you. Though, perhaps, not at the price it sells for.

Book is very well written, and covers all the topics necessary and with the necessary detail to grasp the concepts related to human interface design. Highly recommend this book to anyone!!

This book looks more like a collection of references than a real text book. The author inserts references to other works and papers in such a random and repetitive fashion that makes reading the book a real pain in the ass.

And then there is the verbosity. Apparently, Mr Shneiderman likes to list items and give examples. And he likes it a lot. If you make the terrible mistake of reading this book you will navigate through never-ending paragraphs that make circles and circles around the same idea, giving pointless examples of an anyways pretty obvious concept.

This book is really bad. It looks like the author just copy-pasted the contents of his course slides and inserted some pretty pictures in the middle. Don't waste your money and/or your time with this one.

This is more of a syllabus with references than an actual textbook. It's even a sensible syllabus; if you want an outline of the important topics in contemporary and historical computer user interfaces, Shneiderman's book will tell you what you need to know. But the utility of this book is unclear; it's not intended to teach the reader how to design interfaces, nor does it teach experimental design and evaluation.

At 600+ pages, it's both terse and verbose. Verbose, because of the "let me tell you what I'm going to tell you, tell you, tell you what I've told you" format favored in this kind of overview. Terse because the "tell you" part is a kind of white-washed summary; as soon as a topic is brought up, several references are trotted out, summarized in one or two lines, and then dismissed. I wanted more depth, more case studies, and a higher-level vantage point.

Despite a short tour of command lines, including natural language text commands, and a 10 page summary of speech recognition and synthesis-based interfaces, "Designing the User Interface" is almost exclusively about contemporary computer graphical user interface design. Better books on GUI design include Johnson's "GUI Bloopers" and Raskin's "The Humane Interface".

No other book in the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is as broad, has so many useful guidelines and is a better bibliography as Shneiderman DTUI (Designing the User Interface).

DTUI will *not* give you in-depth knowledge of every aspect of HCI, because that's an impossible task for a single book.
Instead, DTUI focuses on giving you an overview and understanding of central HCI concepts coupled with useful everyday tips, rules and guidelines.

The passionate HCI student will in DTUI also discover a comprehensive guide to the books and articles that have shaped HCI throughout the years. (Reading the HCI body of work, you will soon discover than DTUI is one of the most cited books in the field, an indication of how influential it is.)

To teachers in search of a introductionary HCI book for their classes, I strongly recommend DTUI. "Interaction design" by Jennifer Preece, et al. is another fine book that's has less theory in favor of the practical.

As most reviewers have noted, this is a classic and must-have book in the field of HCI. This fourth edition--newly published in March 2004--has been thoroughly revised to include much material related to the WWW. It does appear that Shneiderman took care to go through each chapter and remove less relevant material in favor of including new topics that have come up since the last edition was written.