allreviews

(It made me think about usability )dont make me think

2011-11-30T00:29:00.003-08:00

About The Author
Steve Krug is a usability consultant who has more than 15 years of experience as a user advocate for companies like Apple, Netscape, AOL, Lexus, and others. Based in part on the success of the first edition of Don’t Make Me Think, he has become a highly sought-after speaker on usability design.

Table Of Contents
Guiding Principles
Don’t make me think: Krug’s First Law of Usability
How we really use the web: Scanning, satisfying, and muddling through
Billboard Design 101: Designing pages fro scanning, not reading
Animal, vegetable, or mineral? : Why users like mindless choices
Omit needless words: The art of not writing for the Web

Things You Need to Get Right
Street signs and Breadcrumbs: Designing navigation
The first step in recovery is admitting that the Home page is beyond your control: Designing the Home Page

Making Sure You Got Them Right
“The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends
Why most Web design team arguments about usability are a waste of time, and how to avoid them
Usability testing on 10 cents a day: Why user testing done simply enough is the cure for all your site’s ills

Larger Concerns and Outside Influences
Usability as common courtesy: Why your Web site should be a mensch
Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets, and you: Just when you think you’re done, a cat floats by with buttered toast strapped to its back
Help! My boss wants me to__________: When bad design decisions happen to good people

I worked on many web applications but never thought about usability,for one of my future assignments I have started reading this book ,it really added many design principles to my knowledge.It made me think about web usability and web acessibility.

It's short like pragmatic series books (224 pages) and entertaining with pictures like headfirst series books.
It's written so short that can be completed within 2 hours.
It is not only about web usability and accessibility but also written how to attract a user with the help of website.

main motto of the book is design your website such that a user is able to get required information easily and quickly.

Steve krug is not only the preacher ,but also the follower of all the principles mentioned there.
He followed all principles to make his book more useable.
Book is so short ,with good pictures and is easy to use.His writing style is so entertaining with movie dialogues (Godfather2).I love that particular statement similar to godfather2's " If history taught us anything ,It is that we can kill anybody".
according to Steve
Flash is good if it is situatonal and short and will be distracting users if it is lengthy.
with respect to current trends of HTML5 and CSS3 that part is changed,you can create good light weight animations with HTML5 and CSS3 as an alternative to Flash.

principles explained in this book are excellent but examples are outdated

latest technolgoies like HTML5 ,CSS3 and latest Javascript frameworks contributed a lot to web usability.

this book is not for advanced users who have good working experience with HTML5 and CSS3 and Web2.0

current technologies and trends contributing to web usabilty are :

1.now a days search dominant websites like google are very powerful and very much usable.
2.social networking websites like facebook are very easy to use .
3.javscript frameworks are contributing a lot to web usability ex:
impressing toggle effects,drag and drop form controls,easy to use accordion effects,auto complete featurees,sortable form controls and beautiful date pickers.
4.Googles did you mean program making it more usable.

I think Steve may write a sequel to this book/an article including above points .

Best part of the book is :

He gave very valuable information on how to conduct usability test on our websites/applications?.
how much it costs?
who should do it?
who should be part of it?
how to fix usability problems?
which problems to fix ?which not to fix?

as far as concepts discussed are concerned,they are still applicapable.
I only misssed web usability with respect to current technologies and trends.of course this is the old book,we should not expect from the same.
now a days I am regular user of a website stackoverflow.com,site is very easy to use.through out the book while I was reading I was always comparing(in mind) to stackoverflow.com,finally when I went to steve krug's website sensible.com,I saw Joel
Spolsky (co-founder of stackoverflow.com)praising comments on Steve krug's another book on same topic.Then I guessed Joel also implemented some concepts of Steve krug to make his website more usable.
when I browsed his site ,I saw his corporate motto(It’s not rocket surgerysm) at the bottom of page,corporate motto is very important to attract users,I felt he should have used it at more prominent place like on top of page.

some bullet points from the book are :

1.do not make user to think while using your site.
2.tabs are very easy to use
3.things which are logically related are also visually related.
4.try to avoid to use scroll bars.
5.try to avoid pull downs.
6.every website should have logo and a tagline under it.

My rating is 4.5/5
If I read this book 3 years ago, I would have given 5/5.

similar books from other authers.

1.the design of everyday things --by donald norman

other books from Steve Krug

1.rocket surgery made easy -the do it yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems

Six Thinking Hats review

2009-10-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

Six Thinking hats

author:Edward De Bono

Contents

prefix
1.Introduction
2.Six Hats,Six Colours
3.Using Hats

The White Hat

4.The White Hat:Facts and Figures
5.White Hat:Whose fact is it?
6.White Hat Thinking :Japanese style input
7.White Hat Thinking :Facts ,Truth and Philosophers
8.White Hat Thinking :Who puts on that hat?
9.Summary of White Hat Thinking

The Red Hat
10.The Red Hat:Emotions and Feelings
11. Red Hat Thinking :The place of emotions in Thinking
12. Red Hat Thinking :Intuitions and Hunches
13. Red Hat Thinking :Moment to Moment
14. Red Hat Thinking :The Use of Emotions
15. Red Hat Thinking :The language of Emotions
16.Summary of Red Hat Thinking

The Black Hat
17.The Black Hat:Cautious and Careful
18. Black Hat Thinking:Content and Process
19. Black Hat Thinking:The Past and The Future
20. Black Hat Thinking:The problem of Overuse
21.Summary of Black Hat Thinking

The Yellow Hat
22.The Yellow Hat:Speculative Positive
23. Yellow Hat Thinking :The Positive Spectrum
24. Yellow Hat Thinking :Reasons and Logical Support
25. Yellow Hat Thinking :Constructive Thinking
26. Yellow Hat Thinking :Speculation
27. Yellow Hat Thinking :Relation to creativity
28.Summary of Yellow Hat Thinking

The Green Hat
29.The Green Hat:Creative Thinking
30. Green Hat Thinking :Lateral Thinking
31. Green Hat Thinking :Movement instead of Judgement
32. Green Hat Thinking :The need for provocation
33. Green Hat Thinking :The alternatives
34. Green Hat Thinking :Personality and Skill
35. Green Hat Thinking :What happens to the ideas
36.Summary of Green Hat Thinking

The Blue Hat
37.The Blue Hat:Control of Thinking
38. Blue Hat Thinking :Focus
39. Blue Hat Thinking :Program Design
40. Blue Hat Thinking :Summaries and Conclusions
41. Blue Hat Thinking :Control and Monitoring
42.Summary of Blue Hat Thinking

43.Benefits of The Six Hats Method

Conclusion.

Size:177 pages

about author:
Edward De bono was faculty at Oxford university.
He is well known as a faculty for teaching Thinking as a skill.He penned 62 books and his books translated into 37 languages.Dr bono has been invited by 52 countries to lecture on this topic.His approaches are followed by so many multi national companies like IBM,ABB ,Shell,Ericsson and MC Kinsey.his works are adopted by so many schools through out world.

Six Thinking hats Review

Concept of the book is how to change the way of thinking so that we can make better decisions in personal life and even in professional life.author is well known for this topic.talking about book,very simple language is used and any one can easily understand what author is saying.book is very well organized .according to author thinking process is not an art ,it is science anyone can easily master it.according to my experience ,I used to worry about my inability of decision making.I have read this book and implemented the six thinking hats and now I am able to make any decision effectively and that too with in short time.I too believe anyone can easily make great decisions by implementing this approach.all corporations can implement this process to reduce their meeting durations and can achieve great productivity within short time.coming to concept,thinking process is divided into six categories and they are named with six different colored hats.here hat represents a role or a category of thinking process.namely six categories are
1.white hat thinking
2.red hat thinking
3.black hat thinking
4.yellow hat thinking
5.Green Hat thinking
6.Blue Hat Thinking
de bono says every thinking process has it's own meaning and purpose and one coloured hat thinking should not be mixed with another.all of them will come in a order.white hat thinking is Information Thinking,Red hat Thinking is emotional thinking,Black hat thinking is cautious Thinking,Yellow hat thinking is positive thinking ,green hat thinking is creative thinking and blue hat thinking is a kind of thinking which will control all of the above.
white hat thinking is all about data we should have data any thing before we start thinking about it.
for instance ,if we have a plan of watching movie,white hat thinking says we should know how many moview halls are there around us,what are the show timings,what are ticket prices and how far are they to us?.
That is white hat thinking.red hat thinking represents emotions of the situation.He says that red hat thinking is about emotions we should not mix this with any other hat thinking.if we mix ,we will never be able to decide the good thing.
Black hat thinking talks about problems of the situation.if we have to go to movie.in black hat thinking we will analyze all the problems for that .like whether we have sufficient money,sufficient time and whether we have desired movie on halls.we categorize problems into two.problems which we can overcome and problem which we cannot over come.
if we have money problem,we can not watch movie and if we do not desired movie ,we can watch some other movie as we have already decided to watch a movie.if we have a problem which we can not over come .we should stop thinking.so that we can save lot of time for other things.If we have problem which we can overcome Yellow hat thinking says we should be positive about that to achieve and green hat thinking suggests ideas to solve the same.and Blue Hat thinking specifies in which order we have to think.standard way is we should start with red hat thinking becuase emotions are important to achieve anything .later white hat thinking should come in with information.after that black hat thinking should come in with problems if problems are not solvable we have to stop thinking.other wise we have to proceed with yellow hat thinking and finally green hat thinking should come in.I like this book most.this book is so precise and powerful.simple techniques to use.so many people think book is redundant but I feel that is author style of writing because of which the concept has reached so many people.

other books by author:

1.I am right and Your are wrong
2.Lateral thinking.
3.Teach your child how to think.

info.txt

2009-10-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

# Contact info submissionurl: stoicalreview.blogspot.comsite_owner: Balaswamydisplay_email: dns-admin@google.comsite_name: one blog for all book reviews site_description: one blog for all book reviews

Head first Servlets and jsp review

2009-08-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Head first Servlets and jsp review

authors:Kathy Sierra,Bert Bates and Bryan Basham

about authors :
___________
Kathy Sierra: she has been interested in learning theory since her game development career. As part of that she took this head first methodology of teaching and she succeeded in that.
She successfully wrote so many java books by using head first methodology. one of them ,
Head first design patterns won awards like Jolt award and was in the list top ten books of amazon.com
She is a member of development teams of so many sun certified java examinations. she is also the founder of one of the largest java community websites javaranch.com.
Bert Bates:
He is a software developer and architect. He also interested in learning theories and artificial intelligence. Like Kathy sierra he is also member of the sun's java certification exams development teams.
He is also founder of the great java community website javaranch.com.
Bryan Basham:
He has 20 years of experience in software development and was the lead designer for SCWCD1.4.

Contents
__________

introduction
1.why use servlets and JSP
2.web app architecture
3.Mini MVC Tutorial
4.Being a servlet
5.Being a web app
6.conversational state
7.Being a jsp
8.Script-free pages
9.Custom tags are powerful
10.when JSTL is not enough
11.deploying your web app
12.keep it secret,keep it safe
13.the power of filters
14.enterprise design patterns

appendix a :final mock exam

review
________

It is another good book from head first series, this is very much useful foe the people who are targeting SCWCD1.4.book is well organized and brain-friendly study guide in authors words.
as the book's main target is SCWCD1.4 it does not tell you how to deploy servlets and jsp files with a specific server.
for the beginners it tells from the beginning and for the advanced it covers all in depth details of servlets and JSP.
It is better to read it from the beginning even though we have some servlet and JSP knowledge.
many readers told that who reads and practices examples given back on the chapter,can easily score 90 plus score.
in the appendix good mock exam is given.many concepts are explained with good diagrams so that we can easily understand them.

more books from same author(Kathy sierra)
_________________________________________
head first ejb
head first design patterns
head first object oriented analysis and design
head first java

Database In Depth review

2009-07-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

Database In Depth - Relational Theory for Practitioners

Author : C . J . Date

Size : 202

Press : Oreilly

About author:
_____________

He is a well known relational database authority, who also worked with EF Codd , relational database father.
He worked for IBM as core team member for the development of well known relational database products like DB2.
He also invented a new relational database product called Tutorial-d.he wrote so many books on relational database.
His one more book on the same topic is "Introduction to database Systems”. It is considered as academic book in so many universities.

Contents
________

Foreword

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Relations versus Types

3. Types and Relations

4. Relation variables

5. Relational Algebra

6. Integrity Constraints

7. Database design theory

8. What is relational model?

Appendix A: A little bit of logic

Appendix B: Suggestions for further reading

Index

Review
_______

This book is so short and precise on relational database. In this book, Date explains how a ideal relational database
Product should be?. He also clarifies all misconnections against the relational model.
He explains what an ideal database product should contain. He says every database product should implement all EF Codd rules.
He compares all database products features with mathematics like relation.
He says all database product operators like JOIN, UNION, UNION ALL, INTERSECT, PROJECTION AND SELECTION are similar to
Relational operators. And further to it, he says all properties of a mathematical relation like closure property,
Commutative and associative laws also apply to database products.
He even explains simple misconception like so many people think database and database management system, both are one and the same.
He explains both are different and should not be used interchangingly.his terminology is high level, clear and up to the situation.
This book is well organised.Date took simple database of only 3 tables and had explained everything with help of them.
he gave challenging questions for practice , after resolving them one can achieve significant improvement on this topic.
He says a simple query can be written in many ways. but one has to bother about the performance of the same.
He explains so many ways how to improve the performance of the queries.
He also explains database design and how to normalize the database very clearly.
Date explains all fundamental features of an ideal database product.
According to him so many database products do not have basic relational database features.
Other side is, his terminology in this book is very high level and hard to understand sometimes. He always tries to explain his own product Tutorial-d syntax. This is very redundant.
Surely this book is not for the beginners, who want to learn database product features,
If you got any hands on and interested to know about the database design then you should have this copy.

Sudoku the utterly addictive number-placing game --book1 review

2009-07-13T03:25:00.000-07:00

Sudoku the utterly addictive number-placing game --book1

compiled by wayne gould

Contents

Introduction

Tips from compiler

Puzzles

Easy 1-4

Mild 5-30

Difficult 31-75

Fiendish 76-100

review

the times of India published 3 books of sudoku.this book is the first one of them.
book contains some useful tips to solve sudoku and it also contains 100 sudoku puzzles in
four levels namely Easy ,Mild ,Difficult and fiendish with solutions.
this is good book for the people who wants to learn sudoku and kill some time every day.
one can easily master the sudoku by solving these sudoku games one level after another.
i didnot find great tips and tricks from this book ,
still i feel this books is good one to kill the time by solving one sudoku every day.

Scjp Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 by kathy sierra and bert bates review

2009-06-23T05:10:00.000-07:00

Sun certified programmer for java 5 review

authors : Kathy sierra,Bert bates

Kathy Sierra: she has been interested in learning theory since her game development career. As part of that she took this head first methodology of teaching and she succeeded in that.

She successfully wrote so many java books by using head first methodology. one of them ,

Head first design patterns won awards like Jolt award and was in the list top ten books of amazon.com

She is a member of development teams of so many sun certified java examinations. she is also the founder of one of the largest java community websites javaranch.com.

Bert Bates:

He is a software developer and architect. He also interested in learning theories and artificial intelligence. Like Kathy sierra he is also member of the sun's java certification exams development teams.

He is also founder of the great java community website javaranch.com.

contents

1 . declaration and access control

2 . object orientation

3 . assignments

4 . operators

5 . Flow control , Exceptions , and assertions

6 . String , I/o,formatting , and parsing

7 . generics and collections

8 .inner classes

9 . Threads

10 .Development

review and summary

first chapter contains 4 objectives namely 1.1,1.2,1.3 and 1.4

1.1 says what are the class declaration rules and access modifiers and how they have to be used.

1.2 explains class modifiers like abstract,final,strictfp and details of interface implementation

1.3 describes local variables ,other modifiers like synchronized,variable declaations , array declarations and it also includes java 5 feature enum

like array declaration should not contain include size and enum may contain constructors and local variables.

1.4 explains static variables and methods and also includes java5 feature var-args like var-args must be the last parameter in a method.

second chapter contains 6 objectives namely 5.1,5.2,1.5,1.6,5.4 and also includes previous chapter objectives 1.2 and 1.3

5.1 says what is encapsulation , IS-A and HAS-A relationship and also explains coupling and cohesion

5.2 explains polymorphism and reference variable casting

5.4 explains overloading and overriding,constructors and instantiation.

1.5 describes overloading and overriding and return types.

1.6 says about constructors and instantiation

Third chapter contains 4 objectives namely 7.3 ,7.4 ,3.1 and 7.6 and also includes previous chapter objectives 1.5,1.3 and 5.4

7.3 says how to pass variables into methods.

7.4 describes what is garbage collection and how it happens.

7.6 explains scope ,basic assignments ,using a variable and array element that is uninitialized and unassigned.

3.1 says how to use wrappers and when to use boxing and unboxing.

whole fourth chapter contains only single objective called 7.6 which is also been discussed in the previous chapter

topics covered under 7.6 objective are :

realtion operators

instanceof operator

arithmetic operators

String concataion operators

increment and decrement operators

Ternary and logic operators

Fifth chapter contains 6 objectives namely 2.1,2.2,2.3,2.4,2.5 and 2.6

2.1 says how to use if and switch statements

2.2 describes how to use loops and how to use break and continue.

2.3 explains assertion mechanism java1.4 feature.

2.4,2.5 and 2.6 explains how to handle exceptions.

sixth chapter contains 5 objectives namely 3.1,3.2,3.3,3.4 and 3.5

3.1 describes string,stringbuilder and stringbuffer.

3.2 explains File I/O.

3.3 describes serialization.

3.4 analyses Dates,Numbers and Currency

3.5 explains parsing, tokenizing and formating

seventh chapter contains 5 objectives namely 6.1,6.2,6.3,6.4 and 6.5

6.1 describes collections and key attributes of collections.

6.2 explains hashcode() and equals() methods

6.3 says how to use collection classes

6.4 explains generics java 5 feature

6.5 tells how to sort and search lists and arrays and describes utilities in collections and arrays.

eightth chapter does not contain any objectives but covers 4 topics namely

1.inner classes

2. method local inner classes

3.anonymous inner classes
4. static nested classes

ninth chapter contains 4 objectives namely 4.1,4.2,4.3 and 4.4

4.1 says how to define ,instantiate and start threads.

4.2 describes thread state transitions and sleep,yield and join.

4.3 explains thread deadlocks,concurrency and synchronization

4.4 describes how objects communicate with the help of wait and notify.

tenth chapter contains 3 objectives namely 7.1 , 7.2 and 7.5

7.1 says how to use static imports

7.2 describes how to use java and javac

7.3 explains JAR files how to search by using java and javac and also explains packaging and searching.

Rich dad,Poor dad review

2009-05-06T05:52:00.000-07:00

name : rich dad,poor dad what the rich teach their kids about money that the poor and middle class do not.

authors : robert t. kiyosaki and sharon lechter

pages : 266

contents

introduction( there is a need)

1 . rich dad,poor dad

2 . the rich do not work for money

3 .why teach financial literacy

4 .mind your own business

5. the history of taxes and the power of corporations

6 .the rich invent money

7. work to learn--don't work for money

8. overcoming obstacles

getting started

9.getting started

10.still want more

epilogue

college educaton for $7000

about the author(s)

robert t. kiyosaki

he is business man ,investor,author and inventor of cash flow technologies inc and founder of several games, cash flow based.

sharon lechter

she is CPA,author and co-founder of the cashflowtechnologies inc.

overview

co-author sharon lechter says , in introduction , how she met the author robert t. kiyosaki and how they began working together.

author describes how the rich teach their kids about money that the poor and the middle do not teach.according to Robert's words ,the poor and
the middle always

think that their life will be secure if they get good grades in school and get good job in big company, which is not real.kiyosaki illustrates with examples , so many people
who got good grades in school and has got good job in big company are also struggling with financial problems because of lack of financial intelligence.
because financial intelligence is never taught in schools and in homes properly.all parents tell their kids "to get grades in schools and
goog job in big company, your life will be secure"but kids get grades ins school and good job in big company but they do struggle their life paying all bills and taxes
and unfortunately they too suggest their children to do something.this is continuous process which is called rat race in
author terms.author says all have to come out of this rat race,to do that everyone has to improve one's financial intelligence in order to become rich.
he explains how to come out of this rat race with examples of his two dads(rich dad and poor dad) rich dad is his friends dad
,he didn't complete his eight standard, but financially well settled,form whom he learns tips to improve his financial intelligence.
poor dad is his own dad,he completed his PHD degree ,got good job but he is financially struggling.