Books about Design

Funny and engrossing, it should be your first guide to learning design patterns. The information is presented using vivid examples, elaborate diagrams and essential source code. Many questions from the reader are anticipated and answered along the way. The one beef I have with the book is its lack of a good appendix that can act as a reference. Of course, if you buy the book or make notes, you can overcome that problem.

Tags: software design

A book about user interface design, it is very well-written when it sticks to details and examples. There is a greater emphasis on desktop-based software, but many of the ideas can be applied to other contexts too, and the authors do a good job of explaining other contexts. The book has an unfortunate trend towards preaching too much, when simple matter-of-fact concepts would be enough.

Tags: software design

The author reviews all the different ways that persons and teams may be mentally blocked in finding solutions to a problem. Some factors are particular to the individual, some are environment-specific, like culture, organization, etc. Well presented ideas.

Tags: innovation design

Steve Krug explains the key elements of website usability in this simple-to-read book filled with funny illustrations. An unfortunate problem for me while reading this book was that many of the concepts mentioned in the book are now common knowledge and hence they are not very striking. However, the book will serve well as your first introduction to usability for web sites.

Tags: software design

This is a very old book - first written in 1981 and the edition I read was a 1995 edition, before Java and other newer object-oriented languages became popular. Still, it is a good read and introduction to object-oriented programming from a business perspective. It also goes into some length on object-oriented databases and reusability. Some of the expectations in this book are yet to come to fruition.

Tags: software design programming

Reynolds wants to write about good PowerPoint presentation, and he does a very good job at it. He explains the poor ways in which business people (including Bill Gates) currently use PowerPoint, and how much better it can be, citing the example of Steve Jobs, among others. He shows us some very good examples of PowerPoint presentations that he and other people (independently) have prepared. The book also contains examples of poor slides and how they can be improved. Reynolds draws upon the knowledge of experts such as Edward Tufte to illustrate how graphics should be presented. The place where the book stumbled was in its use of Zen theme: it did not do a good enough job of blending them into the main content of the book. It almost seemed like "Presentation" was separate and "Zen" was separate. Nevertheless, good book and must-read.

Tags: design

Based on new researched conducted by the authors, they have come up with various factors that hinder usability for end users. There are signs of optimism that most web designers are staying from many bad web development practices, but issues still plague many popular websites. My only complaint about this book is that it offers no summaries, which makes it difficult to easily look at the principles at one shot. Luckily the Coding Horror site provides a quick list.

Tags: software web design

This book (2nd edition) covers the various types of websites and how they should be built. It covers different design needs as well as common standards for usability. Web designers can use the book to understand web design principles in detail. For other readers, this can serve as a reference book for their specific web development needs.

Tags: software design web

A great introduction to UML, it demystifies the complexity of the language in a very simple and approachable manner. Fowler's writing is so simple, direct and conversational that you breeze through the book.

Tags: software design

This book contains 60 common mistakes made by web designers with respect to usability, layout and other aspects of the website. It contains several examples from popular websites, including how those websites later fixed those mistakes. One problem with the book is that since it was written a while back (c. 2003), some of the bloopers are less common nowadays. Use this book in conjunction with Jakob Nielsen's useit.com website.

Tags: software design web

Emphasizing writing use cases instead of drawings. A bit too detailed for easy reading. The author could have provided a more simple example.

Tags: software design