Theresa's List of Essential Books for User Interface Designers

Nice list from my co-author and cohort in design. Now I need to get my list together. But over half are on my list as well.

Designing Web Interfaces Book Site and Flickr Companion Site Live

I am happy to announce that the two companion sites to my book are now live.

designingwebinterfaces.com is the companion book site as well as the book's blog site. Look for some exciting articles on the blog in the next few weeks.

The companion Flickr site should also be helpful as it provides all of the book's figures under a generous Creative Commons license.

Update: Designing Web Interfaces Book Available for Pre-Order

In an earlier post I mentioned our upcoming O'Reilly book, Designing Web Interfaces that I coauthored with Theresa Neil. The good news is we are getting very close to publish date -- December 2008 or January 2009. It is now live on Amazon and available for pre-order.

You can read about the contents of the book here and here.

The book is a partial outgrowth of various talks I have given over the last few years: Designing for Ajax, Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction and When Designers Get Too Clever: Anti-Patterns.

(By the way, the bird on the cover is the Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock and the image is from Johnson's Natural History. Yeah, I feel like strutting ;-)

The work on the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library also helped frame of lot of the ideas presented in the book (there are 75+ patterns discussed).

Additionally the work that Theresa & I did at Sabre Airline Solutions in documenting design patterns, performing heuristic evaluations on two dozen complex airline products as well as actively designing new solutions for the suite of products brought a lot of the principles to light while writing this book.

Two other items I am very excited about.

Companion Flickr Site
First, following the example of Luke Wroblewski (who also wrote the Forward to the book) we will be making all of the figures and illustrations (over 500 images) available on the companion Flickr site. In addition since many of the images are keyframes that illustrate steps in an interaction, I will be making the original screencast movie available on the flickr site as well. You can see an example of this for All the Web's Live Search (Yahoo! experiment that is no longer available). Like Luke, we will make all this material available via Creative Commons. You will be free to use it in your presentations, etc. We only require attribution back to our book.

Companion Book Site
Additionally, Theresa & I will be posting and keeping up to date a companion book site, DesigningWebInterfaces. We will be posting new examples, new patterns, new anti-patterns as well as links to other great pattern sites or books. Note, that it is just a "parked" page at the moment. Look for the site to be live around the book publish date. Stay tuned here for the go-live announcement.

Everything Good You Needed to Know About Javascript*

(*and even the bad parts)

At Yahoo! I had the privilege of working directly with Doug Crockford and got to review a book he was writing at the time, Javascript The Good Parts.

This book is different than most other Javascript books. It just focuses on the language itself and not the browser DOM. It reveals both gems and warts. And it does it in a simple straightforward manner. It reminds me of the classic The C Programming Language book that I cut my teeth on.

This is a must for your bookshelf.


You can get JavaScript: The Good Parts at Amazon.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Forms*

(*but were afraid to ask)
My good friend and former Yahoo! colleague, Luke Wroblewski, has just published a most excellent book called Web Form Design.

Forms are everywhere. And when something is so ubiquitous, it tends to get absorbed into the back of our consciousness. Luke takes the lowly form and shines a spotlight on form usability. This book is full of best practices, tons of examples and lots of great insight from a dozen or so other leading web practitioners.

And hey. I can get you a 10% discount. Just go to Rosenfield Media and apply the code BSCOTT. Just enter it on the last page of checkout. You will save 10% and get a great book.