Bookshelf

In mind/on shelf

Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas,David Hansson,Leon Breedt,Mike Clark,James Duncan Davidson,Justin Gehtland,Andreas Schwarz
This book rocked my programming world. People like me aren't really engineers by nature, but Ruby and Rails are one step closer to making Web development a little more humanistic.

Posted by Jason Schock on February 28, 2007 - Permalink
The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
Here's how to not design a sucky application. If you don't want all the gory details, you can just read The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
The total "duh" guide guide to usability. Easy read, and a good intro to the subject.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir
It gets a little redundant, but fun for flipping through on coffee breaks.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink
The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Coooper
Cooper gives an overview of product design and the existing dominated-by-engineer paradigm that leads to design suckage.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink
Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder
Design specs suck, HTML prototypes take too long, and working prototypes tend to make their way to production.

Paper prototypes let you design interfaces quickly, and make revisions quickly.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld
"The post-Ajaxian Web 2.0 world of wikis, folksonomies, and mashups makes well-planned information architecture even more essential. How do you present large volumes of information to people who need to find what they're looking for quickly? This classic primer shows information architects, designers, and web site developers how to build large-scale and maintainable web sites that are appealing and easy to navigate."

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
A three-year-old toddler is "a grammatical genius"--master of most constructions, obeying adult rules of language. To Pinker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psycholinguist, the explanation for this miracle is that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly "hard-wired" into the brain and partly learned.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman


Posted by Jason Schock on June 14, 2005 - Permalink
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte


Posted by Jason Schock on June 14, 2005 - Permalink
Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward Tufte


Posted by Jason Schock on June 14, 2005 - Permalink
1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz


Posted by Jason Schock on June 14, 2005 - Permalink
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe


Posted by Jason Schock on April 23, 2005 - Permalink

In hand/reading

New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin
Falling somewhere between Donald A. Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things and Ben Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface, Raskin's book covers ergonomics as well as quantification, evaluation, and navigation.

Posted by Jason Schock on February 28, 2007 - Permalink
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Norman revisits his ideas from the Design of Everyday Things, but now adds human emotion into the mix.

Posted by Jason Schock on January 18, 2007 - Permalink