Rating: 
Summary: A good resource
Review: There are not that many titles covering information architecture. This is surprising if one considers how many web sites are poorly organised and constructed. The book is mainly about the organisation of information. Graphic artists and programmers will be disappointed, but people who are interested in designing usable websites for real people, should find this book valuable. The book is presented as an introduction. To get deeper into any of the subjects covered, the reader will have to follow it up with other resources.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent ideas on IA
Review: This is another example of a book I wished I'd known about a year or so ago. I'm an amateur web designer and up until just recently maintained web sites for three different volunteer groups. Now one of them has decided to get another person to run the site. If I'd known about the concepts presented in this book, I might still be running it! The book discusses how to organize the content on a wbe site and covers a lot of areas the average site designer might not consider on first glance. There's nothing more frustrating than being in the "middle" of a site and "getting lost" with no way out other than to start over. While this is an extreme example, too many sites suffer from navigational problems. This book offers choices on how to organize the information on your site, various ways to design it, the types of systems you can use to search for specific data on the site, researching and planning it (with a great outline on what you should include in your research), and the business of creating and maintaining your design. The book's authors stress the importance of keeping everyone in the process involved in it at all times, as well as pointing out that just because you finally finished it does not mean your job is over! There's always the job of keeping the site as current as possible. Anyone responsible for maintaining a site (even if it's just your own) should take a look through this book.
Rating:
Summary: You cannot design good web sites without this book
Review: Louis and Peter defined what it means to be an information architect. And this book makes it very clear that good Web sites must be architected, not simply designed and not simply coded. It is a shame, really, that the term "designer" has been appended to the word "Web" to mean anyone who has ever written any HTML. Hogwash. The creation of great Web pages is not random and is not done by one person. This book lays out the role of the person, called the information architect, who determines the structure of a site and how the visitor to the site will reach the bits they want. Once the IA is done, visual designers, developers, and other team members can implement this architecture. The two of them, through their former company Argus Associates, and through the Argus Center for Information Architecture, have forced the Web disciplines to evolve and to confront what lack of good architecture and design creates.
Rating: 
Summary: The book was lacking
Review: I don't know if it was just me but I didn't get the point of the book. The authors mainly introduced a bunch of concepts but they didn't do anything with them. It also seemed like the book was used for telling us why IAs are so great. I agree but I didn't buy the book for that. Disappointing since I was looking forward to reading the book.
Rating:
Summary: Lost opportunity to become 'standard reference'
Review: What is great about this book is that there are very few others of its kind (that I have seen). That is why I am giving it 4 stars. However, otherwise I would have given it 3 stars for reasons mentioned before. The authors seem to drop some pearls of wisdom but do not show us the treasure trove. I suppose that is their right as professionals in the field facing potential competition from the readers. And some things in this area cannot be learned by using examples. But still, it seems like a lost chance to be a definitive popular treatment and possibly open up a long set of editions at the university level etc. I would have liked to see a longer book with more illustrations, particularly sample site structures and page designs. Maybe they will do a second edition based on reader feedback.
Rating: 
Summary: hors d'oeuvre
Review: In an e-world crowded by a cobweb of sites, one could surely do with some information architecture. This book is the first step toward understanding the importance of IA in the success of a site. The most endearing part about the book is the fact that the authors have not overlooked the practical difficulties. It's easy to preach theory, it's darned difficult to put it in practice. Thanks to their many years of experience, the authors hand out quite a few useful tips to iron out those real-world wrinkles. In Chapter 3 (Organizing Information), for instance, the authors deal with tackling internal politics of the organization so that the site doesn't reflect "the strong undercurrent of politics." The authors have kept a very wide spectrum of readers in mind. In their words, "...we wrote this book to be accessible to anyone who has used the World Wide Web more than once or twice." That's the reason why anybody who has anything to do with the Web will find this book helpful. And that's also the reason why those who dream in pixels and drop-down boxes may not get satiated. But then, a good starter is as important as the main course. I'm sure Rosenfeld and Morville are putting together a delectable fare for the main course. I'm waiting. And drooling...
Rating:
Summary: Kudos to Rosefeld and Morville
Review: A book on web design written by librarians. Skeptical? So was I. But darned if they don't hit the ol' web design nail right on the ol' head. (Okay, they're not really librarians - but both authors come from a Library Science background.) When I started on my Interaction Design masters degree, there wasn't anything written sepcifically about it. So my education was based on other fields - architecture, rhetoric, psychology, graphic design. Now we're starting to see some good Interaction Design books coming from experts in those other fields. The strength of this book is its emphasis on defining a navigable structure for a site. It covers structure, navigation, searching/browsing, and this is the first book I've seen that spends a whole chapter on button and link labelling systems. It's added labelling to my ID vocabulary. I do agree with another reviewer who wanted more in-depth examples, but with enough web experience it's easy to come up with examples on our own. So I gave the book the fifth star. This and Jennifer Fleming's Web Navigation (both O'Reilly books) are must-haves for web designers.
Rating:
Summary: Disgracefully poor writing skills marred this book.
Review: I have never written reviews but I was so inspired by my distaste for this book that I could not resist. The content in this book might be helpful but the mediocre writing skills of the authors made it impossible to read. The grammar was of a sub-high school level and yielded confusing sentences. The writing style was also very unprofessional thus undermining the credibility of the authors. This one really made the O'Reilly reptutation drop a notch for me. What a catastrophe!
Rating:
Summary: Good, not great
Review: The other reviews of this book left me wondering what to expect - useful info or lightweight nonsense - which would it be? Well, it's the former (mostly). There *are* problems here - it's a tad out of date, there's rather too much low-end padding and there's little in the way of practical advice. That said, when the authors do occasionally risk dumbing up their arguments the results are worthwhile - I certainly learnt a thing or two. Read this in conjunction with Jakob Nielsen's Web Useability, Donald Normans' The Design of Everyday Things and the useit web site for extra impact. But I still think the killer IA book has yet to be written.
Rating:
Summary: Food for Thought
Review: Ever been to a website that screams for a rework? I have. I have even created a number of websites that, after reading this book, I'm seriously taking another look into. This book explains, in simple terms, how to optimize website navigation and indexing for different audiences. It really makes a developer start to think about how others view their website and that just because they feel it should be presented in one way, that isn't always the best method for designing the information presentation.
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