Rating: 
Summary: Best introduction to the usability perspective, bar none
Review: Joel Spolsky has brilliantly condensed the essential points of usable interface design into a witty, entertaining, and brief book.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun to read
Review: Lots of great stories and examples, good illustration though at times it seems quite disjoint with the text and just thrown in for example's sake.Overall not a whole lot there though. A great idea if it were better executed. Lots of fluff, unfilled pages and wide spacing make for a quick read and empty feeling.
Rating:
Summary: Short, sweet, succinct
Review: Most programmers hate user interface programming. They think UI design is in the realm of groovy graphic designers. But UI design is not art, it's just a set of rules. Joel Spolsky's cardinal axiom of all user interface design is to match your program model to the user model. In other words, your program should behave exactly as the user expects. If you can do that, and apply the other corollaries he provides, your program will be usable. In this 144 page color illustrated book, Spolsky shows you plenty of examples of what works, and what doesn't. You'll learn UI design rules you can apply to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to Web sites to consumer electronics. Spolsky *sounds* like a programmer too, boiling things down to their essence with wonderful wit. Even if you have the best algorithms in the world, if users can't figure out how to use your program, it's practically useless. Giving users what they expect makes learning your program that much easier. But how do you find out what the user model is? Ask them. This is a great book written by an experienced software industry veteran. Recommended. From WebReference.com.
Rating:
Summary: insightful and hillarious
Review: My family kept asking me how I could possibly be laughing so much at a book on programming. The anecdotes in this book are fantastic at conveying fundamental UI principles, but they're also so entertaining that I finished the entire book the day I got it.
Rating:
Summary: insightful and hillarious
Review: My family kept asking me how I could possibly be laughing so much at a book on programming. The anecdotes in this book are fantastic at conveying fundamental UI principles, but they're also so entertaining that I finished the entire book the day I got it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great way to get introduced ...
Review: Not only is `User Interface Design for Programmers' a fun read, but it's also a fun way to get introduced to the world of user interface design. It teaches you the basics of UI thinking, while at the same time keeping the "level" high enough for more experienced designers to like it.
Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: The book covers the basics of UI design. As a software developer I found it a good introduction to some of the basic principles involved. The book is not suitable as a reference work, as it only covers a finite set of ideas, and not in an exhaustive manner. However, the book is well written and does give one a solid foundation on which to build a more in-depth knowledge of UI design.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining Look at Basics of UI Design
Review: The strength of this book is that it's one you'll read. With its light style, an abundance of colorful illustrations, and plenty of white space, it can easily be read in a single sitting. It makes quite a few good points, and does so with the help of excellent visual examples. On the other hand, the scope of the book is so broad that its applicability to a specific environment or task will be limited. Unless you're developing an entire operating system, your choices in designing a user interface are constrained by the environment you're working in. Web developers don't have the same choices as Windows developers, who are in a different world from text-based programmers. If the book focused on a single environment it might have been as useful as it is entertaining. This is a good starting point for application developers, but you'll need something more specific if you want much practical guidance.
Rating:
Summary: Fun to read
Review: This book is an excellent first book on UI design. It covers a lot of ground and is easy to read. The author is both witty and entertaining. An excellent read.
Rating:
Summary: Great Beginner UI Book
Review: This book is an excellent first book on UI design. It covers a lot of ground and is easy to read. The author is both witty and entertaining. An excellent read.
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