Software Development
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability is the result of Steve Krug sharing his expertise in a very controversial field. If you count up all the web designers in the world, that number would come close to the number of opinions on the One Right Way to design a web site. Krug addresses how to resolve these "religious debates" as well as how to take a common sense approach to web usability. He also details a great way to do some usability testing which he insists is an abs
Edward Tufte lays out a very comprehensive study of how to effectively display information in a visual format. Charts and graphs are a huge part of today's corporate communication medium and yet they are often malformed and fail to convey information properly. This is a great book for laying down some principles that can apply across technologies and medium and help to formulate high quality information communication. Due to the nature of this book, my notes here will be a very brief summary
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini was Apple's "Human Interface Evangelist" at the time he wrote this book. His wry sense of humor and engaging writing style make this a fun read as well as informative. Tog was there in the formative years of the user interface of the Apple and Mac operating systems. His guidelines are foundational for those seeking to design user interfaces even today. The book's content and layout come from his monthly question and answer column in the Apple Direct magazine. While To
This book is fascinating! Over 700 glossy pages take you on a journey through the field of interaction design. (It's a heavy book.. be careful when you pick it up!) Bill Moggridge in Designing Interactions, does a masterful job of presenting the history, the personalities and the principles of the field of interaction design. If you write software, design hardware, design products or are just interested in some really cool stuff... this book is for you!
Real Number: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization would be considered by some to be a "dry read". Personally, I found it a fascinating read as my interest in Lean principles has been piqued over the past year and a half or so. Jean Cunningham serves as CFO at Lantech, Inc. and Orest Fiume retired as VP of Finance and Administration of Wiremold. Fans of Jones & Womack, authors of Lean Thinking and The Machine That Changed The World, will recognize these two companies as having been cas
This is the third "edition" of Cooper's excellent book on human computer interaction design. Cooper's primary tenet in these books is that software is poorly designed, primarily because programmers don't understand what users need and users don't know how to articulate those needs. He argues that designers are needed as intermediates to translate what users really need into terms that programmers can program to.
"Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development" is a must read for anyone in the software development field. Whether you are a manager, a developer or a consultant, this book will help you view the profession differently. Scott does an incredible job of being a down-to-earth visionary... someone who can see things clearly from 50,000 feet, but has the technical legs to stand on the ground and look the code in the eye. What follows here does the book no justice
Full disclosure: I am a software developer that is generally a free-market conservative. David Rice writes as though software developers are incompetantly nefarious drolls who have created a market failure that requires heavy government intervention to protect the masses. If that sounds like "over the top" rhetoric, wait until you read his book. Peppering his prose with emotionally charged language like "sad irony", "public ignorance" and "shockingly", and of course his most quoted phrase "six
"Patterns" has become a bit of a buzz word in software development of late. Kent Beck takes a different angle on the topic with his book "Implementation Patterns". Beck takes the notion of patterns from being a somewhat abstract discussion of object oriented design down to the "bare metal" of the writing of the code itself. In my opinion, every programmer ought to read this book, even if they don't follow his advice. The ideas and concepts explored are critical to a deep understanding of wha
This is a collection of chapters that are essentially research papers by various authors. The subject matter is generally along the lines of HCI, however some of the topics are very narrow. Among the topics are utilizing AI for the interface, creating better e-commerce web sites and incorporating HCI concepts into the software development life cycle. If you are interested in researching any of these topics, each chapter is well research and each has its own bibliography. What follows is not
Donald Norman provides an excellent treatise in the design issues surrounding usability. He focuses most of his effort on the design of physical products such as automobiles, home appliances and building components, however his attention to computer interaction design is very prescient considering the year of this book’s publishing.
This "review" is more of a sketch of notes I took while reading this book. Crandall, Klein and Hoffman deliver an intensely practical look into a realm of psychology that could be very difficult to comprehend. The book surrounds the notion of Cognitive Task Analysis which is essentially a method of studying how people think. Klein's work has surrounded primarily the way people make decisions (Sources of Power) however in Working Minds the authors also look at how people learn to do new jobs,
Robert Austin manages to sum up in this short book the observations that bothered me for 16 years working for FedEx. As a courier for most of those years, I watched the company struggle with measurement dysfunction as they attempted to get more and more productivity from their employees. The symptoms I witnessed first-hand are so clearly described by Austin that it surprises me that no one at FedEx picked the book up and fixed the widespread problem. If you doubt me, stop your FedEx courier s
Naomi Karten has written a very comprehensive book dealing with a wide range of issues relating to communication within an organization. While she touches from time to time on personal communication issues, her primary focus is on organizational communication with an emphasis on the information technology field. As with most speakers who also write, her writing style reflects the fact that she is more comfortable with the spoken word and from time to time you get the impression that her humor
Sub-titled "From Concept to Cash" this book from the Poppendiecks explores in detail what it takes for software development teams to take a concept and turn it into a working solution for the customer in an Agile manner. They start with a brief history of Lean production concepts and then delve into the Principles of Lean as applied to software development. The core of the book digs deep into very practical methods of converting a more "traditional" approach to software development into a "lea
This edition of "Lean Thinking" is an update of the 1996 book by these authors. Womack and Jones do an excellent job of capturing the essence of lean business processes, and more importantly, the essence of how to implement lean practices. The book is full of anecdotal evidence of the power of lean thinking and is well organized to present the material to even those readers who may not be familiar with lean concepts. The historical information regarding the evolution of lean thinking is compr
The Google Guys are fascinating to a lot of people and of course since I am a software developer they are intriguing to me on many levels. David Vise does a very good job of unveiling the facts and providing some insight into the world of Google. There is a touch of sycophancy in the tone of the book so I read it with the proverbial grain of salt, however true to his journalistic roots, Mr. Vise did portray at least some of the darker side of Google. While I use Google on a daily basis and st