March 24, 2008...1:14 pm
Current Reading List
I thought this week I might just run down the books that are on my desk, in queued for reading. I always have a reading pile but it is generally stuffed with periodicals and copies of articles that people have left. Rarely does it ever have any height to it but I’ve been on a bender to beef up my library some (the budget is closing soon so I should expense while I can) and it is the size of the pile is getting impressive.
Currently Reading
I am currently reading O’Reilly’s “Designing Web Navigation – Optimizing the User Experience” by James Kalbach. The design of each page is almost worth the price of the book alone. A lot of this just reiterates best practices of navigation design but had lots of fantastic sidebars on Usability and Accessibility. The book has 13 chapters divided into three sections; Foundations, Framework and Special Contexts. That third section is why I really bought the book. Its chapters are “Navigation and Search”, “Navigation and Social Tagging Systems” and lastly “Navigation and Rich Web Applications.” This is really nice because it addresses something as basic as navigation plus how navigation is being affected by modern trends and technology. I have about three more chapters to go on this one (incidentally…the same chapters I bought the book for).
Next in Line
After the O’Reilly book, I was going to read Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” I’ve great things about this and just thumbing through it…this guy doesn’t beat around the bush. Seems like very practical information…the kind of stuff you can put in front of a VP and get your point across. It’s always good to have one of those in your bag. Really, it’s about 180 pages of small paper, large text and lots of images. This will be great on a flight.
Last
Just bought this yesterday because I had a 25%-off coupon and have wanted something on both standards-based design and advanced CSS. It is Andy Budd’s “CSS Mastery – Advanced Web Standards Solutions.” This is a pretty hardcore development book but I did have the coupon and all.
That’s it for me for the week.
Leave a Reply