Human-Computer Interaction Books

When used as a graduate level textbook, this work places extreme demands on the student. The lack of simple examples to explain foundation concepts places the student at a disadvantage from the start. The summary examples at the end of each section seemed to be confined to the author's research work and leave the reader more puzzled than enlightened. The endless stream of acronyms is initially annoying, but then becomes almost comical as the experienced reader (ER) becomes more accustomed to the practice. The text is a good resource for anyone specifically interested in risk management of water resource projects. For the rest of us, we'll have to look elsewhere.

The author spends a great deal of time describing his models and methods (referred to by highly forgettable acronyms) as if they were standards of practice. The writing is not easy to read and the organization of the material and poor indexing do not facilitate use as a reference. A lack of problems and exercises (as well as the use of non-standard terminology) makes the book hard to use as a classroom text.

There are much better book available that cover this material.

I was dismayed by the low quality of the binding and general production values of this book. The cover binding broke in my first half hour of gentle and practiced use -- I have been handling textbooks as a graduate and undergraduate for nearly 20 years, and I know how to handle a book. The low quality is outrageous given its price of over 100 dollars. One has (sadly) come to expect some price gouging in the marketplace of advanced academic textbooks; however the least such pirates should do is to provide decent quality and production values in their overpriced wares.

On the other hand, this text seems to me to be practically indispensable in its coverage of the mathematical underpinnings of a part of Systems Engineering which has grown greatly in prominence in the past decade or so--That is, risk management. The book is pretty chaotic and appears hastily thrown together from recently published papers and other "young" sources. But (I believe) one has to look past some of the shortcoming and acknowledge that it contains some very valuable material, presented by one of the genuine pioneers in the field.

The book contains many modern risk analysis tools not found in other books of its kind. What I like with the book is that it presents very sound and meaningful challenges to many traditional risk methods and provides alternative techniques to correct these shortcomings. The examples are practical and easy to comprehend. I hope that the future editions shall include exercises (or problems) to serve as mechanism to further hone the understanding of the students (or any readers of the book).

For the price of this book (which I see has now gone up even more!) there's too little of substance here. This is a very thin book with too much space taken up telling us how smart cards are used in industry, business, etc. all of which has nothing to do with getting smart cards going in *your* application. If you needed convincing that smart cards are useful for business applications you wouldn't be looking for this book, would you?

If you are an absolute beginner with smart cards you may get some useful tidbits of information here, but I don't think there's anything here you couldn't find through a couple hours of research via Google or from any smart card manufacturer's documentation. If this was a low cost beginning tutorial it might be of some value at one-fourth or one-fifth of its current price.

I bought this book looking for a deeper reference regarding Javacard applets, native code in smartcards and so on. Neverthless I found the book very useful in the off-card stuff, because it explains in a very clear way how to access the terminal, send APDU's, etc., always using the Open Card Framework which is very important for us Java developers. I strongly recommend this if you are developing applications in Java that must access smartcards, but if you're developing also the on-card software, let's say the Javacard applets, then you must also get the book from Zhiqun Chen also available in amazon.

The important thing that I notice is that the book is too heavily based on the Open Card framework. I needed instead a book on java card first. Only found some tutorials on the net until now.

As a person who is concerning in developing javacards via OCF, found this one very useful due to contents that it has on framework. You could get and develop off-card apps, if it does make sense to you..

I bought this book for class and aced the class. I found this book helpfull and inspiring for people in the web usability field of study. Even though this is 1994 book, web usability aticles apply to today world as well.

I bought this book at a discount from a local retailer due to its age. After looking at some of Jakobs new material I was eager to get my hands of some of his previous work. Although I found this book useful, it was not as apporiate as some of his more recent work. Worthwhile all the same.

I do usability inspections as part of my job. I bought this book based on Nielsen's reputation and the description of this book here on Amazon.com. I was very disappointed to find that this book was scholarly, not practical. After scanning the book, I returned it for refund.

This book is academic and a dry read. There are better books out there which address this same material that makes for an easier read. But if you want to read the original work that paved the road for those books and usability now, here it is. Academic research that is usability's foundation!

Social networking is the emergent web phenomena of the moment as the recent Morgan Stanley report on internet trends makes clear. What's much harder is to get to grips with this at a global level, beyond the headline grabbing dominance of Facebook and MySpace. Fortunately An De Jonghe's book steps nicely in to fill the gap, with a simple to follow structure which breaks down each region into its component countries, and under each country common categories of social networking according to Business, Friends, Dating, Special Interest, Video and Mobile.

What I also enjoyed was the accessible style in which the information is presented, giving a sense of the people behind these new social networking sites, from their replies to An De Jonghe's exhaustive resaerch printed along side url and contact details.

In short it's a real treasure trove of information which provides an excellent overview of what's going on and where things are going in social networking across the globe.

A very broad and big guide to nearly all social media sites but like any yellow pages it really lacks any depths as to what the sites are really about.

This book is just a listing of over 1000 socialo networks, and not, as the title perhaps suggest, a way of how to use these networks or any other tips or description of how they change your life.

useful if you have a stategy of entering a certain unknown world.

A very good book mainly focused on Scenario-Based analysis which you can actually use in every other subject and aspects of your life (even if you are choosing between trips). I bought this book as a text book for an HCI subject in VT and it was interesting to follow.

This book is a good reference in many points of the usability process - evaluation, design, and testing. The authors organize chapters in a very structured way that the content is very digestible. At 448 pages, the book isn't meant to be read in a single session, but again, it's a great reference.

My favorite part about this book is the fact that it actually has a section on user documentation - something that is lacking in many books on the subject of usability, and the achilles heel of many projects.

Man, where do I start? I was actually looking forward to a college class on designing easy-to-use computer applications. Boy did I not get what I was looking for, in large part due to this book.

First off, this textbook is boring as heck. Almost everything is black and white, and the design scheme of the book alone makes one not want to read it. In fact, this book is a poor example of usability in its own right.

So that's the looks. The actual content is not particularly useful either. Instead of giving practical, real-world advice, it spends too much time waxing strong about a stupid model called "scenario-based development," as I remember. This is basically the common-sense and annoying pet theory of the authors.

Finally, the examples and interface illustrations in the book seemed so out of date for a book copyrighted in 2002. Just a thought.

Overall: Reads like an academic book written for stuffy academics. Little practical information on designing good applications is provided.

Some things in this book are very useful, notably the interviews. However, this book is fairly out-of-date, and doesn't reflect the state of the art for speech recognition technology. The section on linguistics is wrong more often than right, and wouldn't add much to the reader's understanding of designing speech interfaces even if the errors were corrected. While I think that the authors' knowledge of user interface design, in general, is solid, their experience with speech is less so. For example, in the interview with Kate Dobroth (which is really the highlight of the book for me) the authors/editors consistenly transcribe the term "n-best" as "end best" pointing to the authors' inexperience with the technology.

This books provides some great ideas of where and how to get started with Speech Interfaces. I found the interviews to be very helpful. The people interviewed within the book share great insights and ideas as to where they see speech technology going in the future. The technology discussed in the book is low cost, and in my opinion, not very high tech. There are better solutions which can handle more robust speech applications, none of which were mentioned here.

This book is an incredibly elitist rabid intellectual rant, highly opinionated and abstract that were it written by a student it would be judged to be incoherent.Do you know what diegesis means?...becuase i couldn't find it even in a good dictionary.and that's just the tip of the iceberg. As an attempt to communicate it is lousy except to about 10 people in the world who might describe it as a rattling good read...name dropping practically every sentence,showing off prodigious intellectual prowess at the expense of communication.Are you a lecturer? Do you want to ruin the lives of your students? Then tell them to read this.

The digital explosion is ushering in a frightening future built upon transnational structures of power and greed presided over by the high priests of technology and management. But it is not too late to fight for an alternative future shaped not by the corporate cyborg but by aesthetics, the "pursuit of an ethical mode of being ... despite the conditions in which we find ourselves" of "being digital".

Sean Cubitt spits in the face of the digerati (a species of Cyclops who rule in the land of the blind masses) who foresee an infinitely expanding seamless web of information into which all humankind and industry must disappear. Reader in Video and Media Studies at the Liverpool John Moraes University, Cubitt dives into the multi-disciplinary welter of knowledge architectures to distill hard truths from the technobabble of the technotopians. "The fastest and widest impact that computers have had is in deepening the class structures of contemporary society on a global scale ... the demolition, not just of jobs, of communities and of cultures, but of hope itself as a direct or indirect effect of the electronics communication that have enabled the entirely destructive expansion of finance capital," he writes.

Resistance to and subversion of the "matrix", the technetronic, computer-mediated space dreamed up by sci-fi writer William Gibson in which giant corporations call the shots, offered by hackers, crackers and phreaks is an infantile reaction to a global technology which "while offering the appearance of naturalness and emancipation from onerous chores, introduces new orders of supervision and surveillance", Cubitt points out.

His book, a critique of the hard-sell of the digital revolution, is a mine of information as Cubitt apprehends the linkages between technological developments and their consequences for human society.

The problem of the promised utopia is that communication is reduced to aggression, command, power and submission. The matrix, into which the corporations want everyone and everything jacked in, is coded for the re-engineering of the human soul. The synergistic corporation is the actually existing cyborg, "not an assemblage of people but a machine ensemble ...a massive processing machine whose employees and consumers are its biochips", he warns.

The attack on extant cultures is multi-pronged. At the level of language, English is the standard, "oppressor" language of the Net, eroding the core role of other languages and cultural contexts. "Corporate culture responds to micro-cultural resistance with target marketing." And the designers of the Macintosh and Windows WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) interface further saw that "images have a greater efficiency in imparting information than language does" in combination with the expansion of the global market.

Cubitt analyses the process and aesthetics of reading since the human-computer interface allows the infinite generation of texts capable of varied readings. The traditional private and public experience of reading is replaced by the playful, the fantasy. This suits the digerati who foist an illusion of heightened individualism ("the user is in control") and mass personalization on consumers of the digital myth.

Transvestitism and tourism are the features of the Net, much lauded but in truth symptomatic of the shifting, fragmentation and disintegration of the self, Cubitt notes. The new individualism is a projection of the corporate cyborg. Control remains in the hands of the elite who code the heart and confines of the technologies bequeathed to users who are integrated into command heirarchies.

The creation of libraries was followed by the development of systems of classification of information. The synthetic Colon Classification cataloguing system developed by S.R. Ranganathan in 1933 became the founding principle of mechanical systems of information retrieval, the grandparent of Internet search engines and similar knowledge architectures, "no longer dependent on humanist mnemonic culture". Memory fails, and so does meaning, when everything is reduced to an eternal now in real time.

The individual is in danger of losing all privacy with the creation of databases which render him as a "data image" or a "data self". The "real" self is reduced to "mere" writing in binary code, a ghost in the machine. Bizarre forms of desocialisation appear in cyber cultures, community is sacrificed for competition. "To restore the social requires dismantling the binary to build a concept of mediation between presence and absence ... the materiality of media, people and their objects", Cubitt suggests.

He pours cold water on the prophecies of cyber-theologians who deny mortality, the post-humanists and transhumanists who speak of erasing the body and de-materializing the complex human processes of socialization in their fantasies of "downloading the meat-mind into the matrix" and being "human as program or human in programs".

As Cubitt makes his radical analysis of the histories and contributions of poetry, philosophy, art, radio, cinema, video, space technologies, remote sensing and the Hubble telescope, he unveils the magical braid running through it all. "Between the data records and its interpreters there always lies the work of manipulation," he warns. It has to do with the degradation of all "material", including "nature, human-modified nature, human-produced nature and human nature itself" to consumable commodities.

The digitally controlled play-world promises coherence and universalisation, homogenization. It leads to hyper-individualization and dispersion in cyberspace and "the sociality of images and implicitly of shared experience" is lost.

Digital aesthetics, concerned with the question of the future and the whole field of possibilities, suggests that the utopian question cannot be resolved by moving inexorably towards a corporatised technotopia. It must emerge from the shadow of corporate culture, that consciousness industry whose objective is to create brand identity adhered to by synergistic personalities forged through the introduction of play into work, masquerades, role-plays, simulations and alter egos, Cubitt says.

Digital aesthetics must break "the grip of the networked society's culture of selves", refuse being retrofitted into the corporate cyborg and "reinvent the machineries, the processes and selves of human-machine communication", Cubitt states. Thus the foundations for an evolutionary future which is genuinely global and democratic and outside the administered boundaries of the synergistic corporation can be laid. Is humanity up to this challenge? (the end)

I found very little useful information from this book and it seemed a little out of date. A large percentage of the book talks about mathematical and biological issues related to the development of eye-tracking which I have little interest in. If you are looking for a book that will introduce you to eye-tracking in the context of HCI (or specifically usability), you will be disappointed.

This book has been very helpful in both setting up my eye tracking lab and providing theoretical and methodological background material.

I was expecting to read about psychology and sociology as they apply to software development teams. Instead it's a propaganda piece which purports to show how eXtreme Programming is the best way to write software because there's more human interaction involved. So far I've learned that developers are happy to write documentation after the code is nearly complete, and that the development process works better when nobody owns any code. Other methodologies (RUP, Spiral) are only good to the extent that they're like XP.

Note that I think XP has some good points, but every methodology needs to be looked at with a critical eye. This book seems to have been written by college professors who've never actually developed software for a living. It's a weak, weak book.

ADDENDUM 19-SEPT-2007
It's odd to see that a paid reviewer took the time to attack me for disliking the book three years ago. Now I feel obligated to defend myself for posterity, despite the fact that no one will ever read this.

For the record I remember being excited when this book was announced. I actually pre-ordered it. I was expecting a book that described people, personality traits, and how those personalities and traits interacted and responded to the various challenges of software development projects. I was looking for insight into what makes people tick and how I could use that knowledge to make my projects run more smoothly. I was expecting a book with a lot of information about psychology and sociology. You know; the "Human Aspects of Software Engineering" that the title promised.

Instead I got a book about why XP makes developers happier than traditional methodologies. The killer was the illustrative stories at the beginning, which contrast (I forgot the names long ago) Mt. Waterfall and his dull grey cubicle in his dull grey office full of dull grey people under a dull grey sky, vs Ms. Extreme in her happy colorful office with happy colorful workers and free candy. The argument was that Ms. Extreme was happier because her environment was better, but "nice offices, flex-time, and co-workers who are also friends make people happy" wasn't the deep insight I was hoping for.

And I stand by my opinion that the writers of the book did not appear to have ever actually done what they were writing about. "40 years of experience" isn't terribly significant when writing about a methodology that was only (publicly) five years old when the book was written. It certainly had the tone of somebody who has found a magical silver bullet but hasn't yet tried to kill any werewolves with it.

First, a truth-in-advertising disclaimer:

I was a reviewer paid by the publisher to review the book
prior to its publication. While my position is highly
favorable, I do not regard it as prejudiced or influenced
by the publisher's payment. It was clearly understood
before I took the job that I could end up disliking the
book and that I was expected to report my opinion whatever
it turned out to be. Therefore, the opinion that I report
here was arrived at in the normal fair manner. I decided
that the book was good after reading it from beginning to
end, starting with a hope that the book would teach me
something. The book taught me plenty and was so well
written that I had difficulty putting the book down.

To give a flavor of the book, I give the table of contents:

Part I Software Development Environments
1 The Nature of Software Engineering (SE)
2 SE Methods (including Spiral Model, Unified Process, AND XP)
3 Working in Teams
4 Software as a Product

Part II The World of SE
5 Code of Ethics of SE
6 International Perspectives on SE
7 Different Perspectives on SE
8 The History of SE

Part III Software-Human Interaction
9 Program Comprehension, Code Inspections, and Refactoring
10 Learning Processes in SE
11 Abstraction and Other Heuristics of Software Development
12 Characteristics of Software and the Human Aspects of SE

Part IV Business Analysis of SE
13 Software Project Estimation and Tracking
14 Software as a Business
15 The Internet and the Human Aspects of SE

Part V SE Education
16 Case Studies in SE
17 Students' Summary Projects and Presentations
18 Remarks about SE Education
19 Additional Information on Resources used in This Book

I like the coverage of the book. It includes all of the
subjects I would have thought relevant and then some. It's
a great follow on to what was the first and until now the
ONLY book in the area, Ben Shneiderman's _Psychology of
Computer Programming_. Moreover, it goes so much farther
than Ben's book, as it should considering how long ago
Ben's book was published. I really liked Tomayko and
Hazzan's inclusion of ethical issues, the international
issues, the discussion of a variety methods from the
programmer's point of view, the citation of empirical data,
the comparisons to other professions, the history of SE,
and the reflective practices idea.

My own history includes software development experiences,
participations in start ups, participation in the history
of SE, and participation in developing SE education. I
found the chapters on software development teams, software
as a product, international perspectives, the history of
SE, program comprehension and code inspections, software as
a business, and SE education particularly resonating.

The coverage is the correct completeness for a textbook. I
suppose that as a researcher concerned with these issues, I
would like to have seen more depth. However, I can see that
such depth is not appropriate for a text and not
appropriate for a practitioner who wants to just see the
issues and not how the research is carried out and not what
open issues need to be followed up on. However, on the
other side of the coin, their many study questions and
tasks point to this additional depth. Thus the interested
reader can begin to explore them on his own.

Each topic is treated quite thoroughly in that every issue
I can think of about the topics is covered either in their
explanations or in an question that they raise. Of course,
Tomayko and Hazzan do not answer the questions completely
in the book, leaving it to the reader or instructor to have
fun finding the answers.

I love the addition of the tasks for the reader. They got
me thinking. I think they belong where they are, because
then they come up at a time when it is most useful to think
about them. I like the whole approach.

The biggest strength of the book is that it is so engaging
that it is hard to only skim it. One ends up reading it,
and then it is very hard put it down. It is fun to read. It
is informative. It got me to think.

I might add that I simply cannot understand the review of
John Plemme. As one can see even by looking at only the
table of contents, so little of the book is about eXtreme
programming. As a matter of fact, what there is about XP is
not entirely supportive of the idea; it is a careful
discussion of the pros and cons supported by data that the
authors and others have found.

What Mr. Plemme has learned about when programmers are
happy to write documentation and code ownership seem to be
among observations that Tomayko and Hazzan make.

Finally, there is a discussion of the psychology and
sociology of software development teams in Chapter 3.

Did John Plemme read the same book that I did?

Moreover, I happen to know that one of these college
professor authors, namely Tomayko, has over 40 years of
industrial experience developing software, e.g., for a
large aerospace contractor. My view of this book is that
it's a joint effort in which an education expert, Hazzan,
provides reflection on the hard-knocks experiences of a
software development expert who had become an excellent
software engineering professor.

I had recently purchased the NielsenNorman group's International User Interfaces whitepaper, ..., was impressed with the whitepaper, and consequently had high hopes for this book. I was pretty disappointed. It's a mish-mash of articles, only a few of which were very actionable. One such article, in chapter 3, is pretty good in that it covers to what degree various cultures communicate explicitly versus non-explicitly. This fact alone is very useful to anyone doing usability testing or market research outside the US.

We also recommend the book "SW Internationalization and Localization" by Uren, Howard, Perinotti.