User Interface Design for Programmers
by Joel Spolsky
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Book Reviews of User Interface Design for Programmers
Book Review: Concise Architectural Common Sense
Summary: 5 Stars
On receiving the book, my first thought was "what, only 134 pages ?" - these pages are very easy to turn, resembling card-stock rather than unabridged-dictionary. Being in the architectural-musing phase, however, I eventually concluded that a few key items of advice more than paid its way. As a busy architect, your time is valuable, you'd really would prefer NOT to have a tome of padded rambling. 134 good pages at the architectural level.
Thinking on towards the detailed design, a good complement would be Cooper's "About Face 2.0", which is much more detail-oriented, discussing the relative merits of drop-downs etc.
Book Review: Good introduction, but that's it
Summary: 3 Stars
This thin book is a good introduction to the idea of that you should make good software interfaces, but doesn't tell you how to do that. For that, Spolsky provides an excellent bibliography at the end.
If you already have even a little bit of experience with good interface design, this book isn't for you. It's there to enlighten the programming masses that so far don't care or haven't been told that users matter.
You can get this book for free online starting at Joel on Software (I think Amazon deleted the URL I put in there, but google for the book title and you'll find it).
Book Review: Funny and Instructive at the same time....
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Joel Spolsky nails it when he talks about User Interfaces, Operating System quirks, Software Interfaces or Web Interfaces. All the while making the reading entertaining and instructive.If you consider yourself a software engineer "engineering software for human beings to use" you need to read this book! Joel provides a refreshingly agnostic (not very religious about a particular OS or a vendor-oriented way of doing things) fair
assessment of how interfaces do things well as as screw up badly.
Excellent book to read and follow!
Book Review: Well... It *was* fun to read
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a great book if you're someone who knows little about UI Design. If you've been around UIs for a bit, then stay away, you'll find it to be a waste of time. The author explains basic concepts of UI design and provides an example or two. He does a good job at explaining his simple concepts, so this book might be a great way to start with IU design.Mr. Spolsky makes the book lots of fun to read by including entertaining, yet educational, anecdotes. The book is a bathroom-read... buy it an read a chapter or two in letrine. :)
The book was ok, but I was expecting more substance.
Book Review: Turned me into an enthusiastic user interface designer!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book provides excellent concepts to bear in mind when designing the UI. Moreover, it is really fun and easy to read! I enjoyed it a lot, and I would recommend it to any developer, as it made me realize the importance of good design and it helped me improve as a software designer.
I read someone else's comments that the book is not very thorough. I don't know about that, but in any case I would say it is an excellent FIRST book on user interface design that gives you what's most important: the motivation on the subject to read forward.