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Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

I'd never read this web usability classic before and my to-the-point review is this:

There's a reason this book is a classic in the field. It's smart, well written, funny and damned easy to read through*.

Quick hit reviews aside, I was surprised to learn that this book was at least partially written in a Bruegger's that I frequent. It's true. Steve Krug lives in the next town over and tapped out at least some of the book in a Bruegger's just a couple of miles from here. I feel just that much smarter by association

*It's a perfect book for a plane trip, so if you work on the web and haven't read this book pick it up before the next coast-to-coast or transatlantic (or pacific) flight. You'll be a better designer/developer/manager when you land on the other side.

Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction An excellent, truly nontechnical introduction to game theory. While there is some math, it's basic. The vast majority of the book is prose based, focusing on the underlying logic of game theory and using real world analogs to expand on specific points. If you've ever heard the phrases "Prisoner's Dilemma" or "zero sum game" and wondered what they were all about, this book might be just what you're looking for…

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders Not surprisingly, considering my track record with his work, I really enjoyed this collection of Neil Gaiman's short fiction. Interestingly, the first (A Study in Emerald) and the last (The Monarch of the Glen) were easily my favorite tales in the volume. The first being a delicious mash-up of the world's of HP Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes (with a twist) and the last being a sequel of sorts to American Gods (my favorite Gaiman book? Maybe.) With a solid foundation like that I can say pretty confidently, if you've never read any of Gaiman's work, this is a fine place to start.

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Another excellent book. The ideas outlined here would be of benefit to any web application. Small or large, the idea of paring down features to only those "necessary for the users to complete the activity the site is meant to support" is a noble one. I've, more often than I'm comfortable admitting, worked on projects where feature bloat ruled the day and I can tell you from bitter experience, giving in to "nice to have" features can be the absolute death of a project. The biggest disaster I've ever worked on was mostly sunk by feature bloat and lack of focus*.

There's plenty to take away from this well written examination of what's right and wrong with modern web application design. I read this on vacation and while I wouldn't have traded the hammock I was on or the excellent wine I was drinking for anything, some small part of me thought "wow, I'd love to be able to put some of this stuff to work immediately."

One thing I don't fully agree with is Hoekman's admonition, later on in the book, to throw away specifications and requirement documents. While that might work for the less complication applications he outlines in his book (excellent applications all), there's no way to do, for example, a detailed financial services application without relying on solid documentation. When there are complicated business rules in place throwing a developer and a designer in a room with a white board and having them "work it out" just isn't going to cut it.

Still, with a smaller scale, less structured application, the techniques and approaches in Designing the Obvious will be of benefit to anyone working in field of web application design and development. This is a recommended read.

*there was also a painful stab in the chest by a web application framework from hell to help that project into its grave.

Pro JavaScript Design Patterns An excellent book. There are plenty of takeaways from this intense examination of Object Oriented programming in JavaScript. I haven't worked on a project large enough to really benefit from OO JavaScript in the overall (classes/inheritance, etc), but even without switching over to a fully OO framework, there are optimization patterns and namespace patterns outlined in this book that can immediately prove useful no matter what scale of project you're working on.

From a pure "oh, that's cool!" perspective, the chapter on Chaining was a real eye opener. I'd looked at jQuery code, of course, but I'd never sat down to think about how he might have created the().ability().t0().keep().mashing().functions().together(). It's diabolically simple in concept (return this!), but also mighty powerful. Again, it's not one of the patterns I'm looking to adapt any time soon, but it was crazy interesting how simple it is in concept.

Pro JavaScript Techniques (Pro) Reading this book I finally understand why I don't really immediately grasp JQuery code. Resig's doesn't use verbs for his function names. Instead of something like getElementsByClass(), he uses something like class(). I like verbs in my function names.

That aside, this is an excellent book for the serious JavaScript programmer. Resig does a great job of covering the breadth of modern JavaScript techniques and if you've got a reasonably solid JS foundation you can't help but come away from this book with patterns, techniques and approaches that you can apply to your day-to-day code.

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. Want a concise encapsulation of issues pertaining to usability and web design? Look no further than this (free) book from usability.gov. This is a thought provoking, easy-to-digest read that should be required reading for basically anyone that works on the web.

For what it's worth, I did a redesign of my home page based on some of the guidelines and after a couple of weeks I've seen real improvement in home page performance. I'll post a case study in a few weeks, once I have a larger data set.

ppk on JavaScript, 1/e (VOICES) Another excellent introductory book. I got this mostly as a way of thanking Pete Paul Koch for all of his invaluable work over the years at quirksmode.org, but reading it was still a worthy way to spend my time. Not surprisingly (since he knows his stuff backwards and forwards) it's an excellent book, well written, easy to follow and very thorough. I'm going to recommend it going forward to anyone looking for an introduction to JavaScript programming.

O'Reilly Media — Search Engine Optimization More of a monograph than a book, this intro to SEO is a nice little primer on the sorcery that is Search Engine Optimization. A lot of it I knew already, but it's still nice to get a complete overview like this. If you're not familiar with the techniques and concepts, then I heartily recommend this thin download.

The Design of Everyday Things I'm embarrassed it's taken me this long to (a) start reading this book and (b) finish it. It's been on my radar for several years and it was only earlier this year that I got off my butt to read it. Once I started it, it would continually get pushed to the back burner by work or other reading (fiction, mostly,) so it took something like four months to work through. In hindsight this is the sort of book I should have just locked myself in a room for a weekend to read maybe a decade ago. It's really that good, especially since I'm supposed to help advocate for the user as part of my day-to-day existence. The book is basic, but still iinsightful and helps to clarifies many concepts that float around in the world of usable design but might not be fully understood, even by people bandying the concepts around. Want to know what the jackass down the hall is really taking about when he vaguely goes on about "affordances?" This book is for you

Highly recommended.