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The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software
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Author: Chris Crawford
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1886411840
Publisher: No Starch Press (December, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 176,411
Average Customer Rating: 3.86 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Whole book, three words: interactivity over features
This book definitely has a drum to beat, and it's around the value of interactivity over just pure featuritis. However, it goes on and on, littered with what feel like pseudo-scientific statements. It would've been nice to see a few studies of real people, research citations, or even just opinions of somebody other than the author. It felt like he was rewriting the evolution of software over time from his own frame of reference, and then extrapolating about where he thought it was going.Still, there was at least one point I agreed with; interactivity (and, in general, providing value to the user) is more important than additional hanger-on features.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Too full of fluff
If you're looking for a book with over-abstracted filler written by an author with ulterior agendas and a need to use his thesaurus and high school history books to prove his intellectual capacity, this is the book for you. If you're looking for a book that can be more readily applied to interactive design, look elsewhere.Granted, a few of the chapters provide insight into smart design principles and distilling down what is essential to pleasing the end users, but books comprised of a few chapters don't sell very well in today's market of thicker-is-better tech books. Another annoying deception is the copyright date which shows 2003, yet the book is chock full of obviously outdated references such as the lack of web users with broadband and being able to watch full-motion video on your home computer "in the near future".
Rating: 5 out of 5
A lesson in abstraction...
This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to be considered a software developer or who is interested in really making software that users love. Mr. Crawford does a great job of getting right to the heart of software development and what developers SHOULD be thinking about before they start coding.While this book will primarily appeal to the technical type, sales and marketing people could also benefit quite a bit from the concepts, especially on abstraction. I did find that the author can lose the reader from time to time with the details of a concept -- because let's face it, this can be pretty boring stuff -- still even just skimming the book and pulling out the core ideas and concepts should give you a lot to think about and better ways of approaching future development projects.
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