Posts Tagged: books

Letting Go of the Words — Ginny Redish

Letting Go of the Words“Writing web content that works” is the subtitle of this book, and it delivers a thorough treatment of the topic. I don’t think it contains any radical new ideas, but it is a nicely organised compilation of what some people call “best practices” about writing and layout for the web.

Of course, you can’t possibly summarise an entire book with a list of bullet points, but here are the ideas in the book that struck me as being especially useful. Continue reading “Letting Go of the Words — Ginny Redish” →

The Design of Everyday Things — Donald Norman

The Design of Everyday ThingsDonald Norman’s excellent book The Design of Everyday Things has some great ideas on design in general. I first read it 20 years ago — I’ve been re-reading it recently and it’s still a fun and relevant read. His wish list in the book includes prescient descriptions of the World Wide Web and the iPhone, amongst other things. But the thing that struck me was some very sensible and solid advice on error handling. It’s good advice whether you’re building a coffee maker or a web application. Continue reading “The Design of Everyday Things — Donald Norman” →

The Big Red Fez — Seth Godin

This book is nice and short, but it could be a lot shorter. It’s supposed to help you “make any website better”. It invites you to imagine that your website visitors are monkeys looking for a banana. If you don’t make the “banana” easy to see and easy to get, they will go to another website instead.

I don’t think that viewing your visitors as monkeys is a good idea. Continue reading “The Big Red Fez — Seth Godin” →

The C++ Programming Language

Bjarne Stroustrup’s definitive C++ book, The C++ Programming Language, is the only book you really need to give you a deep understanding of C++. It has a reputation of being a dense read — even difficult — but this just reflects the huge amount of information it contains. I have always considered this the best programming text I have ever read, so I thought I should try to spread the word. Continue reading “The C++ Programming Language” →