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Reading

I’ve been reading a fair amount so far this year (I’ve completed 32 books so far, according to my handy-dandy tracking database) - just about half of ‘em have been work-related in one form or another, so I thought it might be useful to post a quick rundown of at least some of what I’ve churned through so far.

Without a doubt, my favorite to date has been Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things - it’s a seminal work in the field, and I’m ashamed that it’s taken me this long to read it. Highly recommended.

What follows is not a complete list of the tech books I’ve read so far in 2004, but it does hit the highlights (and some lowlights).

• Chris Crawford’s The Art of Interactive Design was significantly less pleasurable than Norman’s book. It started strongly, but the overall effect was ruined for me by the way-too-common irrelevant digressions. It didn’t help that Crawford seems to think that Java is the only game in town for interactivity on the Web (and the book was only written last year! What was he thinking?)
• Matt Weisfeld’s The Object-Oriented Thought Process is another winner. I’ve been looking for a good intro to the general strategies that underlie OOP for a while now, and after reading this book I was finally able to stop looking. It’s changed the way I think.
• Jeffrey Veen’s The Art and Science of Web Design unfortunately appears to be showing its age. It wasn’t bad, but a substantial portion of the content has become outdated in the past few years. I wish I’d read it when it was first published.
• Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir’s Homepage Usability…. What can I say? The actual useful content of the book is exhausted within the first 50 pages or so; the rest of the weight is made up of screenshot analyses. A little Jakob is tolerable - a whole book, not so much.
• John Cato’s User-Centered Web Design is pretty much worthless. I’ve blocked it completely out of my mind.
• Cynthia Baron’s Designing a Digital Portfolio wasn’t bad; it’s a nice inspiration piece, and would be more useful to non-web designers than it was to me, but I liked it.
• Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is the best treatment of the subject I’ve seen, and has inspired me to learn more about typography and print design in general. It was a joy to read.
• Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface was good on both a general and a specific level; I left it with a renewed commitment to good design and a set of concrete to-dos for systems I’m working on right now.
• Bob Baxley’s Making the Web Work is both well-written and helpful. It’s what all interaction design books should aspire to (Baxley writes for Boxes and Arrows, if you’d like to get a taste of his ideas).
• Steve McConnell’s Professional Software Development is more accessible than some of his other work but is just as full of good ideas. In particular, his thoughts on professional development are worth taking a look at.

On to the next book!