Human-Computer Interaction Books

The book is very weak in content and has absolutely no practical examples. I'm not an expert in XML, so I won't give a technical estimate, but with new technology like XML one should not only show his favorable opinion, but provide examples to prove it's value. Title is also very misleading - in fact you've got a combination of 'appreciating the need of xml' and XML short description.

This seemed to be a collection of essays that don't quite go anywhere. Maybe for somebody it's good but for me it felt like mix of artists and cultural studies types who don't really get online with some people who spend too much time online in mud's and other virutal 'worlds'. It seem to lack any theortical or intellectual backbone. Aside from that, if you get a list of the essays most of them can be found online. ;)

This is pretty impressive stuff...really. Aslo, the cover is nice.

It is almost criminal for this book to be listed as a "2002" book when all of the content is terribly outdated. Unfortunately I bought it first (not from Amazon) only to find this out. This book is outdated for even a [sale] bin.

This isn't a bad book for 1989. It's not great either.

The problem? Amazon deceptively describes this as a 1st edition published on January 15, 2002. It was published in 1989, as clearly stated inside the book. The content shows its age.

As a PhD student in human-computer interaction, I have bought and read a lot of HCI books - and this one, I definitively should not have.

Not only is the printing very, very bad (is seems as if somebody faxed some papers to a publisher who scanned the faxes and printed them), the book is also not organised (making it - from my perspective, as somebody with a background in physics and cognitive psychology - impossible to detect meaning, neither in the division of the book into parts, nor in the sequence of papers), and the choice of papers is (in my opinion, after leafing through it for at least five times, reading some of the abstracts and all of the contributers' appended CVs), rather dubious.

The introduction is so badly written and typeset - it should have been a warning sign for me.

My advice: Download and print those papers (if you really do encounter them some other place than in this book), and most certainly don't pay over $80.

This book is nothing more than a reprint of the Answer Book from Solaris on the topic. I had hoped for more

I will buy this book if and when it gets down to $37.50 or so, which is where it should be. The authors should protest this grotesquely expensive profiteering and handicapping of knowledge by posting the book online as a free PDF document.

This book is so dated that I am not sure that you could get the examples to compile. Additionally the book was not easy to use or read even during it's time. I had hoped for a book explaining how to create Virtual Worlds, but instead I got a treatise on using one particular program to create boxes on an empty plane.

The .Net in the title is eye-catching, but don't be fooled, this book is about anything but .Net

The author has managed to make a potentially interesting subject unreadable, by the use of multi-clause sentences, obtuse language, constant references to other people's work, and philosophy-speak. My guess is that this was originally written as an academic thesis.

An example, chosen at random from the first chapter:

"Lucy Suchman and Jean Lave have been two of the most influential figures in helping to contextualize action in human-computer interaction. Their emphasis on the situatedness of action offers a radical alternative to the task-based, information-processing accounts of action characteristic of the single-user approach."

The content of The Virtual is quite interesting, Shields does a nice job historicizing the terms and contributing to the debates on the implications of a shifting relationship between the virtually real and the material. HOWEVER, a huge problem if you're interested in this book for research: the last 30 pages were not bound in the new copy of this book that I ordered through Amazon. No notes to chapters 3 through 9, no bibliography, and no index. In that respect, it's just not useful.