One of the best, 13 Oct 2007
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.

Good Content, 01 Sep 2007
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

Packed with awesomeness, 13 Dec 2006
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

One of the best, 13 Oct 2007
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.

Good Content, 01 Sep 2007
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

Packed with awesomeness, 13 Dec 2006
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

The mother of all Interaction Design Books, 21 Dec 2007
Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.

Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.

A masterpiece.

If you really care about users, buy this book, 10 Nov 2007
Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.

The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.

The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.

This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.

The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.

It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!

One of the best, 13 Oct 2007
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.

Good Content, 01 Sep 2007
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

Packed with awesomeness, 13 Dec 2006
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

The mother of all Interaction Design Books, 21 Dec 2007
Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.

Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.

A masterpiece.

If you really care about users, buy this book, 10 Nov 2007
Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.

The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.

The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.

This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.

The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.

It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!

Lots of evangelism, theory and very little practice, 13 May 2007
As a, self-taught, one-man-band website owner/designer/coder/developer I was surprised to realise, upon reading the book, that I was not the 'target audience' for it. I think its more for the middle-men and consultants of big organisations who want to plan a project to the nth degree before a big budget is blown on it.

Because of my hands-on experience, I found that this book merely gave me formal names for many of the processes and aspects of Information Architecture (IA) that I had been implementing already. Despite this, however, I learned a lot from this book. It rounded-off aspects of the topic that I had previously overlooked. It filled some holes and inspired me to make many changes to the information structure of my website.

Unfortunately these gems of knowledge were buried within a lot of waffle. Furthermore, the whole of the first section is pure waffle - which is very frustrating for someone who is eager to learn new practices.

THIS IS AN 'OK BOOK' and you can avoid some of the waffle that I suffered by making the following modifications:
(i) Remove Chapter One (you don't need to read these 15 pages that include waffle on "Why Information Architecture Matters" and two & a half pages on "What Isn't Information Archicture" etc.),
(ii) Remove Chapter Two. It, for example, includes a page titled "Do We Need Information Architects?". It then follows on with 4 more,pointless, pages that provide a thorough list of professions and skills that are related IA! This chapter ends with the message "Now it's time to delve into the guts of IA...so, roll up your sleeves and dig in". The next one starts with "...but before we jump into the actual "stuff" of IA..." -AAARGH!
(iii) So rip out chapter 3 or you'll rip out your hair!
(iv) Next, read chapter 9. (It contains key info that is constantly refered-to throughout the earlier chapters).
(v) Then carry on reading from chapter 4 - Where you actually start learning about actual "stuff" of IA.

This book is 'OK'. It would be so much better if they had structured the information within it a bit better and stripped out about two thirds of the content.

Theory, practice, and a little evangelism too, 19 Feb 2007
When I first told people I was reviewing this book, there was often a blank look. When I explained what information architecture was, then there was invariably a look of pity that passed across their faces. It appears that many people haven't a clue what information architecture actually is, and when they find out, wish they still didn't.

Well, this book has shown me the light. And I'm here to share it with you. Hallelujah, and so forth.

Information is all around us, and thankfully for much of it we have had plenty of time to work out a sensible way or organising it. When you look at a map, you understand the conventions, you know north is going to be up, you know there will be a scale, and so on. So much so, that when those conventions aren't there, if, for example, you are looking at a mappa mundi, you are completely thrown.

A bigger example is that of libraries. We are all used to some form of organisation in libraries - we know that related subjects will be near each other, that we can look this up and go straight to the shelf we want.

This is all well and good, and librarians, such as the authors of this book, have had many years to improve this system, to impose some sort of order on the chaos of so much information. The problem comes, however, when we consider the new sources of information that have exploded over the last 20 years or so. These electronic systems, and the greatest of these is of course the internet, provide completely new challenges - challenges we can start to try and tackle using principles and lessons learnt from other methods of organisation that have been developed elsewhere, but which will ultimately need to be solved in ways we cannot yet fully grasp.

This is where this book comes in. This third edition gives a novice like myself a good grounding in the philosophy behind information architecture, and proceeds to show how this can help in the design of large web sites. Coming from both a web development and a project management background, I felt a sense of relief that the vague concepts I was trying to use were at least recognised elsewhere, and had been developed far beyond what I had been able to. I suspect anyone who has had to grapple with how to display information to users will get a similar feeling when reading this book.

However, the philosophy and semantics are only part of this book. More important is the techniques it describes to actually implement information architecture - both the process, and the likely pitfalls that will be faced in a commercial environment. The formalised process is a good guide to anyone working in this area. (Mind, I would say that - I'm a project manager, so I think processes are intrinsically beautiful...)

These sections of the book, in addition to the examples at the end, provide anyone interested in how to use information architecture to improve their website with the tools they need. There is, however, more to this book.

Information architecture is a very young field. Part of this book is a primer for anyone interested in information architecture as a career, or part of a career. It sets out what, in the opinion of these authors, is a set of ground rules for how to be an information architect - the ethics, what to learn, what tools to use. It follows this with a set of short essays on how to actually sell the concept of IA, because a young discipline needs to carve out its niche in the world, bit by bit, organisation by organisation. It needs people to become enthused by this book, or by others, to take part in the work of popularising IA, to take part in the ongoing work of defining what IA actually is - as a new area of work, there are still many competing views on what it actually is, how it should work, and this book provides only one view of that.

But more importantly, this book shows us that there is still a lot of work to be done in creating a shared set of tools and techniques for navigating this new, vast information resource that we have created. This isn't about making sure commercial websites will make more money, though it will do that. It's not about making people feel happier about their user experience, though it will do that too. It's about making sure we are not overwhelmed, swamped by the sheer volume of data out there. It's about making sure we can find the information we need, and only the information we need, when we want it. It is, in essence, an expression of egalitarianism, the same egalitarianism that drove the internet in its earliest days. If we want to make as much information as possible available, it is ultimately worthless if only a small, trained few can actually find what they need. We need to build the systems that will ensure everyone is able to get to where they need to be.

In short, we need to make sure that the new generation, those who have grown up with the internet a ubiquitous reality, use the best techniques we have had for handling previous information systems, and combine them with completely new ones to create a truly accessible web, one that enables users to get to where they want to be.

So yes, read this book. Use the techniques it talks about. It will make your websites better. But more excitingly, it will let you take part in defining what the map and compass of the internet will actually look like.

Thought provoking book, 27 Jan 2006
The book has many good areas to stimulate thought on the some of the things you should be considering when building applications. Some areas such as librarian practices will have little use in every day work.

Not really a reference book for building usable applications, more of a good night time read.

But for those of you who believe that usability is a big issue that many people overlook, you'll find a friend in this book.

Rather Old, Rather Tired, 12 Jun 2004
This was possibly the first book to use the words "information architecture" in its title that most people ever encountered. It's since become one of the defining IA texts. However, it has not aged very well at all. The discipline of IA has evoloved rapidly over the intervening years, and the view this book has of the field is really now only one facet of it - essentially that of libriarianship and information organisation rather than the wider activities of interaction design and "user experience" that IA has now widened into.

However, as a good, if rather boring introduction to some concepts that budding information architects will need, it's a marginally worthwhile read. The polar bear on the cover is rather a good choice of animal in this case.

Excellent overview - second edition required!, 04 Nov 2002
For someone fairly new to the area, I can't recommend this book enough.
The book is well researched and written in an accessible style - sometimes not an easy thing to do in an area like this.
A couple of minor points:
- The book actually gives some useful pointers for IA for Intranets as well as 'the web' - this should be made more clear
- I don't feel that the book gives adequate information on site maps
- Some of the illustrations look old - this has the result of the book looking like it's out of date - it isn't!

These are minor gripes, however, and should not distract you from buying this book.
But please, 4 years on, can we have a second edition??

One of the best, 13 Oct 2007
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.

Good Content, 01 Sep 2007
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

Packed with awesomeness, 13 Dec 2006
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

The mother of all Interaction Design Books, 21 Dec 2007
Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.

Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.

A masterpiece.

If you really care about users, buy this book, 10 Nov 2007
Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.

The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.

The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.

This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.

The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.

It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!

Lots of evangelism, theory and very little practice, 13 May 2007
As a, self-taught, one-man-band website owner/designer/coder/developer I was surprised to realise, upon reading the book, that I was not the 'target audience' for it. I think its more for the middle-men and consultants of big organisations who want to plan a project to the nth degree before a big budget is blown on it.

Because of my hands-on experience, I found that this book merely gave me formal names for many of the processes and aspects of Information Architecture (IA) that I had been implementing already. Despite this, however, I learned a lot from this book. It rounded-off aspects of the topic that I had previously overlooked. It filled some holes and inspired me to make many changes to the information structure of my website.

Unfortunately these gems of knowledge were buried within a lot of waffle. Furthermore, the whole of the first section is pure waffle - which is very frustrating for someone who is eager to learn new practices.

THIS IS AN 'OK BOOK' and you can avoid some of the waffle that I suffered by making the following modifications:
(i) Remove Chapter One (you don't need to read these 15 pages that include waffle on "Why Information Architecture Matters" and two & a half pages on "What Isn't Information Archicture" etc.),
(ii) Remove Chapter Two. It, for example, includes a page titled "Do We Need Information Architects?". It then follows on with 4 more,pointless, pages that provide a thorough list of professions and skills that are related IA! This chapter ends with the message "Now it's time to delve into the guts of IA...so, roll up your sleeves and dig in". The next one starts with "...but before we jump into the actual "stuff" of IA..." -AAARGH!
(iii) So rip out chapter 3 or you'll rip out your hair!
(iv) Next, read chapter 9. (It contains key info that is constantly refered-to throughout the earlier chapters).
(v) Then carry on reading from chapter 4 - Where you actually start learning about actual "stuff" of IA.

This book is 'OK'. It would be so much better if they had structured the information within it a bit better and stripped out about two thirds of the content.

Theory, practice, and a little evangelism too, 19 Feb 2007
When I first told people I was reviewing this book, there was often a blank look. When I explained what information architecture was, then there was invariably a look of pity that passed across their faces. It appears that many people haven't a clue what information architecture actually is, and when they find out, wish they still didn't.

Well, this book has shown me the light. And I'm here to share it with you. Hallelujah, and so forth.

Information is all around us, and thankfully for much of it we have had plenty of time to work out a sensible way or organising it. When you look at a map, you understand the conventions, you know north is going to be up, you know there will be a scale, and so on. So much so, that when those conventions aren't there, if, for example, you are looking at a mappa mundi, you are completely thrown.

A bigger example is that of libraries. We are all used to some form of organisation in libraries - we know that related subjects will be near each other, that we can look this up and go straight to the shelf we want.

This is all well and good, and librarians, such as the authors of this book, have had many years to improve this system, to impose some sort of order on the chaos of so much information. The problem comes, however, when we consider the new sources of information that have exploded over the last 20 years or so. These electronic systems, and the greatest of these is of course the internet, provide completely new challenges - challenges we can start to try and tackle using principles and lessons learnt from other methods of organisation that have been developed elsewhere, but which will ultimately need to be solved in ways we cannot yet fully grasp.

This is where this book comes in. This third edition gives a novice like myself a good grounding in the philosophy behind information architecture, and proceeds to show how this can help in the design of large web sites. Coming from both a web development and a project management background, I felt a sense of relief that the vague concepts I was trying to use were at least recognised elsewhere, and had been developed far beyond what I had been able to. I suspect anyone who has had to grapple with how to display information to users will get a similar feeling when reading this book.

However, the philosophy and semantics are only part of this book. More important is the techniques it describes to actually implement information architecture - both the process, and the likely pitfalls that will be faced in a commercial environment. The formalised process is a good guide to anyone working in this area. (Mind, I would say that - I'm a project manager, so I think processes are intrinsically beautiful...)

These sections of the book, in addition to the examples at the end, provide anyone interested in how to use information architecture to improve their website with the tools they need. There is, however, more to this book.

Information architecture is a very young field. Part of this book is a primer for anyone interested in information architecture as a career, or part of a career. It sets out what, in the opinion of these authors, is a set of ground rules for how to be an information architect - the ethics, what to learn, what tools to use. It follows this with a set of short essays on how to actually sell the concept of IA, because a young discipline needs to carve out its niche in the world, bit by bit, organisation by organisation. It needs people to become enthused by this book, or by others, to take part in the work of popularising IA, to take part in the ongoing work of defining what IA actually is - as a new area of work, there are still many competing views on what it actually is, how it should work, and this book provides only one view of that.

But more importantly, this book shows us that there is still a lot of work to be done in creating a shared set of tools and techniques for navigating this new, vast information resource that we have created. This isn't about making sure commercial websites will make more money, though it will do that. It's not about making people feel happier about their user experience, though it will do that too. It's about making sure we are not overwhelmed, swamped by the sheer volume of data out there. It's about making sure we can find the information we need, and only the information we need, when we want it. It is, in essence, an expression of egalitarianism, the same egalitarianism that drove the internet in its earliest days. If we want to make as much information as possible available, it is ultimately worthless if only a small, trained few can actually find what they need. We need to build the systems that will ensure everyone is able to get to where they need to be.

In short, we need to make sure that the new generation, those who have grown up with the internet a ubiquitous reality, use the best techniques we have had for handling previous information systems, and combine them with completely new ones to create a truly accessible web, one that enables users to get to where they want to be.

So yes, read this book. Use the techniques it talks about. It will make your websites better. But more excitingly, it will let you take part in defining what the map and compass of the internet will actually look like.

Thought provoking book, 27 Jan 2006
The book has many good areas to stimulate thought on the some of the things you should be considering when building applications. Some areas such as librarian practices will have little use in every day work.

Not really a reference book for building usable applications, more of a good night time read.

But for those of you who believe that usability is a big issue that many people overlook, you'll find a friend in this book.

Rather Old, Rather Tired, 12 Jun 2004
This was possibly the first book to use the words "information architecture" in its title that most people ever encountered. It's since become one of the defining IA texts. However, it has not aged very well at all. The discipline of IA has evoloved rapidly over the intervening years, and the view this book has of the field is really now only one facet of it - essentially that of libriarianship and information organisation rather than the wider activities of interaction design and "user experience" that IA has now widened into.

However, as a good, if rather boring introduction to some concepts that budding information architects will need, it's a marginally worthwhile read. The polar bear on the cover is rather a good choice of animal in this case.

Excellent overview - second edition required!, 04 Nov 2002
For someone fairly new to the area, I can't recommend this book enough.
The book is well researched and written in an accessible style - sometimes not an easy thing to do in an area like this.
A couple of minor points:
- The book actually gives some useful pointers for IA for Intranets as well as 'the web' - this should be made more clear
- I don't feel that the book gives adequate information on site maps
- Some of the illustrations look old - this has the result of the book looking like it's out of date - it isn't!

These are minor gripes, however, and should not distract you from buying this book.
But please, 4 years on, can we have a second edition??

Really good. A must have for jQuery beginners, 05 Sep 2008
"Learning jQuery" is a great complement to jQuery's official documentation, having a nice and clean structure all the times within the book

The book is divided in ten very illustrative chapters containing code samples, and excellent comments related to what is being presented. It also assumes that you have never had any contact with jQuery, but have some knowledge of JavaScript.

Of course most of this information can be found on the Official Documentation, but in my opinion, it's a big puzzle, and you need to find most of the pieces of it, and will always start from the edges, when you sometimes need the middle of it. Those who tried to use it before, will know what I'm talking about, and see that this book is a must if you want to use jQuery on your applications.

I have learned a lot with this book, and although I was working with jQuery for some time, it was very good to recycle everything I knew as well as understand some technical points about why I was doing it that way.



Purely indispensable, 08 Jul 2008
Packt sent me a copy of "Learning jQuery" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. jQuery is a javascript library that I have been using on and off and was delighted to be given a chance to review this book and have a chance to read through and learn about jQuery in a less urgent manner than I had initially.

With a tag-line of "Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" and some 376 pages long (split into 10 chapters, along with three appendices) the book excels at fulfilling that promise.

From the chapter on Getting Started through selectors (css, dom, xpath), Chaffer and Swedberg examine and show how to use jQuery for animations, ajax and manipulating tables to the all important client-side form validation with disarmingly concise eloquence and skill. They also detail how to use and develop jQuery Plug-ins.

Any of the required server-side code examples, for the AJAX chapter, are in PHP but that doesn't make the book any less relevant or more specialised towards PHP - it should be trivial to rework them for any language.

The authors use an example based approach and this works very well as they continue to progressively enhance each example with additional features and functionality - you can really see their shopping cart and image carousel examples really build up into very well formed examples of what can be done with jQuery.

If you haven't already been turned on to jQuery by it's excellent on-line documentation and fluent API (method chaining), this is the book that will do it.

There is one caveat though: "Learning jQuery" was written for jQuery v1.1 and published in June 2007; version 1.2 of jQuery was released four months later with some substantial changes to the API.
This doesn't matter all that much to be honest; obviously this book doesn't cover what's available in v1.2 but until there's a second edition of this book (and wouldn't that be great?) you won't find a better book on the subject.


What you need on jquery!, 14 Feb 2008
First I will have to state, that this is my first and only book on the subject. Compared to most books I have read recently, this is far the most well written book: I hate books where the author doesn't take the time to narrow down his message to the reader. In this case the authors did a really good job. It isn't perfect, but they still did a very good job. If they made a more detailed index I would give this book 5 star and send a free copy to Bill Gates :-) - I'am a .Net freek.

Great book but..., 16 Jan 2008
This really is an excellent introduction to the subject. Very well written with loads of code examples. Nearly everything I've wanted to do has been covered somewhere in the book BUT the big problem is finding the information you need.
The index is truly VERY poor e.g several letters have only a single entry - L for example - many others have just a few entries. I could do with a soft copy of the book to search for things more easily. But don't let that put you off, the contents pages are good, and you can always scribble extra entries into the index as you find things!!

Very good, a must have for the jQuery beginner, 27 Nov 2007
Getting started with jQuery does not have to be daunting, this book will definitely help you get started, and show you key techniques to make your code efficient and feature rich.

The book is aimed at jQuery beginners, all it takes is a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, and an understanding of the syntax of JavaScript; no jQuery experience (or any other framework for that matter) is needed or assumed. The book builds up to more advanced topics, but is still mainly aimed at beginners. However, saying that, I consider myself "intermediate" and I learnt a lot of new techniques from this book, and found some of the examples particularly useful.

In general, chapters are well documented and are also backed up by real world examples so you can see the various functions in action. For example, the Chapter entitled "Events - How to pull the trigger" starts off with an overview of jQuery's event handing functionality, then shows a real world example in the form of a style switcher. Chapters are finalised with a useful summary so you can check what you have learnt within the sections.

The book can be read from start to finish, as it is interesting, keeps you engaged, and gives information in a logical order. It contains many useful tips and functions, a lot of which I never knew about until reading the book.

The language used in the book is clear, concise and easy to understand. Tips and important points are highlighted and contain useful tidbits of information. I would have preferred more of these little tips to give the reader a broader understanding of the discussed topics, but they are currently adequate.

Code samples are well formatted and broken down, with added chunks of code emboldened. Live examples are also provided on the accomplying website, which is useful to get a look of what the code samples do. The examples themselves are of a high quality and useful in many real-world situations. Most of the examples are also shown along with screenshots to show you what the code is doing.

The screenshots themselves are a good quality but, being black and white, some are a little hard to understand what is being shown, and a few are slightly blurry. However, the examples themselves are available online so this is not such as big deal.

My only gripes with the book itself are that the headings could be better spaced out to improve legibility, and more importantly the book could have done with a better, bigger, index at the back; it's hard to find certain functions using the current index.

In conclusion, "Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" is a must have for any developer/designer looking to delve into JavaScript frameworks, and is a welcome addition to my reference book shelf. It beats the official jQuery manual hands down in my opinion, simply because everything is explained in much more detail.

One of the best, 13 Oct 2007
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.

Good Content, 01 Sep 2007
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

Packed with awesomeness, 13 Dec 2006
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

The mother of all Interaction Design Books, 21 Dec 2007
Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.

Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.

A masterpiece.

If you really care about users, buy this book, 10 Nov 2007
Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.

The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.

The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.

This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.

The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.

It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!

Lots of evangelism, theory and very little practice, 13 May 2007
As a, self-taught, one-man-band website owner/designer/coder/developer I was surprised to realise, upon reading the book, that I was not the 'target audience' for it. I think its more for the middle-men and consultants of big organisations who want to plan a project to the nth degree before a big budget is blown on it.

Because of my hands-on experience, I found that this book merely gave me formal names for many of the processes and aspects of Information Architecture (IA) that I had been implementing already. Despite this, however, I learned a lot from this book. It rounded-off aspects of the topic that I had previously overlooked. It filled some holes and inspired me to make many changes to the information structure of my website.

Unfortunately these gems of knowledge were buried within a lot of waffle. Furthermore, the whole of the first section is pure waffle - which is very frustrating for someone who is eager to learn new practices.

THIS IS AN 'OK BOOK' and you can avoid some of the waffle that I suffered by making the following modifications:
(i) Remove Chapter One (you don't need to read these 15 pages that include waffle on "Why Information Architecture Matters" and two & a half pages on "What Isn't Information Archicture" etc.),
(ii) Remove Chapter Two. It, for example, includes a page titled "Do We Need Information Architects?". It then follows on with 4 more,pointless, pages that provide a thorough list of professions and skills that are related IA! This chapter ends with the message "Now it's time to delve into the guts of IA...so, roll up your sleeves and dig in". The next one starts with "...but before we jump into the actual "stuff" of IA..." -AAARGH!
(iii) So rip out chapter 3 or you'll rip out your hair!
(iv) Next, read chapter 9. (It contains key info that is constantly refered-to throughout the earlier chapters).
(v) Then carry on reading from chapter 4 - Where you actually start learning about actual "stuff" of IA.

This book is 'OK'. It would be so much better if they had structured the information within it a bit better and stripped out about two thirds of the content.

Theory, practice, and a little evangelism too, 19 Feb 2007
When I first told people I was reviewing this book, there was often a blank look. When I explained what information architecture was, then there was invariably a look of pity that passed across their faces. It appears that many people haven't a clue what information architecture actually is, and when they find out, wish they still didn't.

Well, this book has shown me the light. And I'm here to share it with you. Hallelujah, and so forth.

Information is all around us, and thankfully for much of it we have had plenty of time to work out a sensible way or organising it. When you look at a map, you understand the conventions, you know north is going to be up, you know there will be a scale, and so on. So much so, that when those conventions aren't there, if, for example, you are looking at a mappa mundi, you are completely thrown.

A bigger example is that of libraries. We are all used to some form of organisation in libraries - we know that related subjects will be near each other, that we can look this up and go straight to the shelf we want.

This is all well and good, and librarians, such as the authors of this book, have had many years to improve this system, to impose some sort of order on the chaos of so much information. The problem comes, however, when we consider the new sources of information that have exploded over the last 20 years or so. These electronic systems, and the greatest of these is of course the internet, provide completely new challenges - challenges we can start to try and tackle using principles and lessons learnt from other methods of organisation that have been developed elsewhere, but which will ultimately need to be solved in ways we cannot yet fully grasp.

This is where this book comes in. This third edition gives a novice like myself a good grounding in the philosophy behind information architecture, and proceeds to show how this can help in the design of large web sites. Coming from both a web development and a project management background, I felt a sense of relief that the vague concepts I was trying to use were at least recognised elsewhere, and had been developed far beyond what I had been able to. I suspect anyone who has had to grapple with how to display information to users will get a similar feeling when reading this book.

However, the philosophy and semantics are only part of this book. More important is the techniques it describes to actually implement information architecture - both the process, and the likely pitfalls that will be faced in a commercial environment. The formalised process is a good guide to anyone working in this area. (Mind, I would say that - I'm a project manager, so I think processes are intrinsically beautiful...)

These sections of the book, in addition to the examples at the end, provide anyone interested in how to use information architecture to improve their website with the tools they need. There is, however, more to this book.

Information architecture is a very young field. Part of this book is a primer for anyone interested in information architecture as a career, or part of a career. It sets out what, in the opinion of these authors, is a set of ground rules for how to be an information architect - the ethics, what to learn, what tools to use. It follows this with a set of short essays on how to actually sell the concept of IA, because a young discipline needs to carve out its niche in the world, bit by bit, organisation by organisation. It needs people to become enthused by this book, or by others, to take part in the work of popularising IA, to take part in the ongoing work of defining what IA actually is - as a new area of work, there are still many competing views on what it actually is, how it should work, and this book provides only one view of that.

But more importantly, this book shows us that there is still a lot of work to be done in creating a shared set of tools and techniques for navigating this new, vast information resource that we have created. This isn't about making sure commercial websites will make more money, though it will do that. It's not about making people feel happier about their user experience, though it will do that too. It's about making sure we are not overwhelmed, swamped by the sheer volume of data out there. It's about making sure we can find the information we need, and only the information we need, when we want it. It is, in essence, an expression of egalitarianism, the same egalitarianism that drove the internet in its earliest days. If we want to make as much information as possible available, it is ultimately worthless if only a small, trained few can actually find what they need. We need to build the systems that will ensure everyone is able to get to where they need to be.

In short, we need to make sure that the new generation, those who have grown up with the internet a ubiquitous reality, use the best techniques we have had for handling previous information systems, and combine them with completely new ones to create a truly accessible web, one that enables users to get to where they want to be.

So yes, read this book. Use the techniques it talks about. It will make your websites better. But more excitingly, it will let you take part in defining what the map and compass of the internet will actually look like.

Thought provoking book, 27 Jan 2006
The book has many good areas to stimulate thought on the some of the things you should be considering when building applications. Some areas such as librarian practices will have little use in every day work.

Not really a reference book for building usable applications, more of a good night time read.

But for those of you who believe that usability is a big issue that many people overlook, you'll find a friend in this book.

Rather Old, Rather Tired, 12 Jun 2004
This was possibly the first book to use the words "information architecture" in its title that most people ever encountered. It's since become one of the defining IA texts. However, it has not aged very well at all. The discipline of IA has evoloved rapidly over the intervening years, and the view this book has of the field is really now only one facet of it - essentially that of libriarianship and information organisation rather than the wider activities of interaction design and "user experience" that IA has now widened into.

However, as a good, if rather boring introduction to some concepts that budding information architects will need, it's a marginally worthwhile read. The polar bear on the cover is rather a good choice of animal in this case.

Excellent overview - second edition required!, 04 Nov 2002
For someone fairly new to the area, I can't recommend this book enough.
The book is well researched and written in an accessible style - sometimes not an easy thing to do in an area like this.
A couple of minor points:
- The book actually gives some useful pointers for IA for Intranets as well as 'the web' - this should be made more clear
- I don't feel that the book gives adequate information on site maps
- Some of the illustrations look old - this has the result of the book looking like it's out of date - it isn't!

These are minor gripes, however, and should not distract you from buying this book.
But please, 4 years on, can we have a second edition??

Really good. A must have for jQuery beginners, 05 Sep 2008
"Learning jQuery" is a great complement to jQuery's official documentation, having a nice and clean structure all the times within the book

The book is divided in ten very illustrative chapters containing code samples, and excellent comments related to what is being presented. It also assumes that you have never had any contact with jQuery, but have some knowledge of JavaScript.

Of course most of this information can be found on the Official Documentation, but in my opinion, it's a big puzzle, and you need to find most of the pieces of it, and will always start from the edges, when you sometimes need the middle of it. Those who tried to use it before, will know what I'm talking about, and see that this book is a must if you want to use jQuery on your applications.

I have learned a lot with this book, and although I was working with jQuery for some time, it was very good to recycle everything I knew as well as understand some technical points about why I was doing it that way.



Purely indispensable, 08 Jul 2008
Packt sent me a copy of "Learning jQuery" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. jQuery is a javascript library that I have been using on and off and was delighted to be given a chance to review this book and have a chance to read through and learn about jQuery in a less urgent manner than I had initially.

With a tag-line of "Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" and some 376 pages long (split into 10 chapters, along with three appendices) the book excels at fulfilling that promise.

From the chapter on Getting Started through selectors (css, dom, xpath), Chaffer and Swedberg examine and show how to use jQuery for animations, ajax and manipulating tables to the all important client-side form validation with disarmingly concise eloquence and skill. They also detail how to use and develop jQuery Plug-ins.

Any of the required server-side code examples, for the AJAX chapter, are in PHP but that doesn't make the book any less relevant or more specialised towards PHP - it should be trivial to rework them for any language.

The authors use an example based approach and this works very well as they continue to progressively enhance each example with additional features and functionality - you can really see their shopping cart and image carousel examples really build up into very well formed examples of what can be done with jQuery.

If you haven't already been turned on to jQuery by it's excellent on-line documentation and fluent API (method chaining), this is the book that will do it.

There is one caveat though: "Learning jQuery" was written for jQuery v1.1 and published in June 2007; version 1.2 of jQuery was released four months later with some substantial changes to the API.
This doesn't matter all that much to be honest; obviously this book doesn't cover what's available in v1.2 but until there's a second edition of this book (and wouldn't that be great?) you won't find a better book on the subject.


What you need on jquery!, 14 Feb 2008
First I will have to state, that this is my first and only book on the subject. Compared to most books I have read recently, this is far the most well written book: I hate books where the author doesn't take the time to narrow down his message to the reader. In this case the authors did a really good job. It isn't perfect, but they still did a very good job. If they made a more detailed index I would give this book 5 star and send a free copy to Bill Gates :-) - I'am a .Net freek.

Great book but..., 16 Jan 2008
This really is an excellent introduction to the subject. Very well written with loads of code examples. Nearly everything I've wanted to do has been covered somewhere in the book BUT the big problem is finding the information you need.
The index is truly VERY poor e.g several letters have only a single entry - L for example - many others have just a few entries. I could do with a soft copy of the book to search for things more easily. But don't let that put you off, the contents pages are good, and you can always scribble extra entries into the index as you find things!!

Very good, a must have for the jQuery beginner, 27 Nov 2007
Getting started with jQuery does not have to be daunting, this book will definitely help you get started, and show you key techniques to make your code efficient and feature rich.

The book is aimed at jQuery beginners, all it takes is a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, and an understanding of the syntax of JavaScript; no jQuery experience (or any other framework for that matter) is needed or assumed. The book builds up to more advanced topics, but is still mainly aimed at beginners. However, saying that, I consider myself "intermediate" and I learnt a lot of new techniques from this book, and found some of the examples particularly useful.

In general, chapters are well documented and are also backed up by real world examples so you can see the various functions in action. For example, the Chapter entitled "Events - How to pull the trigger" starts off with an overview of jQuery's event handing functionality, then shows a real world example in the form of a style switcher. Chapters are finalised with a useful summary so you can check what you have learnt within the sections.

The book can be read from start to finish, as it is interesting, keeps you engaged, and gives information in a logical order. It contains many useful tips and functions, a lot of which I never knew about until reading the book.

The language used in the book is clear, concise and easy to understand. Tips and important points are highlighted and contain useful tidbits of information. I would have preferred more of these little tips to give the reader a broader understanding of the discussed topics, but they are currently adequate.

Code samples are well formatted and broken down, with added chunks of code emboldened. Live examples are also provided on the accomplying website, which is useful to get a look of what the code samples do. The examples themselves are of a high quality and useful in many real-world situations. Most of the examples are also shown along with screenshots to show you what the code is doing.

The screenshots themselves are a good quality but, being black and white, some are a little hard to understand what is being shown, and a few are slightly blurry. However, the examples themselves are available online so this is not such as big deal.

My only gripes with the book itself are that the headings could be better spaced out to improve legibility, and more importantly the book could have done with a better, bigger, index at the back; it's hard to find certain functions using the current index.

In conclusion, "Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" is a must have for any developer/designer looking to delve into JavaScript frameworks, and is a welcome addition to my reference book shelf. It beats the official jQuery manual hands down in my opinion, simply because everything is explained in much more detail.

A good book by a master in his field, 19 Jun 2008
Eric Meyer is chief aiuthority in this field and this book was perfect for what I needed to know on CSS for part of my degree project on accessibility and tableless design.

Good, but not that good a read., 22 Apr 2008
I can't fault this book for its content. It does indeed cover the A to Z of CSS. However, I personally found it very dry. I went through it from cover to cover, and the examples etc all worked as stated (in comparison to far too many books out there which are full of errors), however, I have had no real urge to return to it for reference since.

I've given it 4 stars because anything less than that would be criminal. However, it didn't engage me like some of the better CSS books out there.

Excellent general text, 31 Jan 2008
Computer text books are rarely as clear, comprehensive and easy to use as this one. Well written, good indexing and well thought out examples.

I went from zero knowledge to being totally at home with CSS using just this book and the odd web search.



Very good Reference for any Web Developer, 28 Nov 2007
The book is big and I think not meant to be read but taken as a reference instead. Basically it is very helpful when you need to fix a display issue or find the exact meaning of any CSS attribute. What I like is the accuracy and the amount of information you can find in this book. I would recommend it for any web developer working on very recent web designs.

An excellent reference, but don't mistake it for an introduction., 02 Aug 2006
In this fantastically detailed book, Eric Meyer explains the basics of css and systematically elaborates on each css property, their scope, and values. Whilst the book is not designed to be read as a guide or an introduction, it does make an excellent reference for those times when you need definitive information on a particular css property.

If you're looking to learn about css, I wouldn't recommend relying on this book alone; buy yourself a real beginner's guide, and maybe get this as a reference tool for when you need to clarify something. As I learnt more about css, I found often found myself flicking through the book and having moments of realisation when paragraph or two would clarify something I'd read elsewhere. That's the sign of a good reference book.

Some people may find the book a little heavy going to begin with. I don't think the book has been designed with the intention that the reader go through it cover to cover in one go. I found that reading a lot of the book at once left me with a lot of questions: these were answered through practical experience with css, and through other, less detailed, introductions. However, I do feel as though the difficulties I had were a result of my lack of understanding rather than any real problem with the book itself; it's still the one book I'll turn to when the others don't answer my questions.

All in all, this is a great book: it won't walk you through your first steps in css, but it does provide exactly what you need when you're lost and need some real answers. If you're new to css, pair this book up with a well-rated introductory text, and you'll be all set to go. For those who have some practical css experience, I'd recommend this as a great reference tool, without hesitation.

One of the best, 13 Oct 2007
This is one of the best design books I have ever found. It's everything from the history of how mice and gui's were first invented to just interesting information and interviews from the people who started it all. Still reading it, buts its very interesting and well worth it.

Good Content, 01 Sep 2007
Not only is this book exquisite, it also has remarkably good content. And then on top of that it's huge as well :) Definitely worth buying, I promise you it wont sit on your self, and has interviews with extremely relevant people. The only downside is that in 10 years or so it may be a little dated, but only because the concepts in here will have been implemented.

Packed with awesomeness, 13 Dec 2006
This is a huge book that actually lives up to its size. It's not one of those design books that kind of looks nice and then ends up on your shelf, it's actually full of great anecdotes, experiences and lessons from people who've made great (and not so great) stuff. Oh and it has a DVD of videos from those same people too. Fantastic.

If you design anything remotely interactive, from a website to a bottle-opener, you should own this.

The mother of all Interaction Design Books, 21 Dec 2007
Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.

Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.

A masterpiece.

If you really care about users, buy this book, 10 Nov 2007
Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.

The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.

The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.

This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.

The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.

It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!

Lots of evangelism, theory and very little practice, 13 May 2007
As a, self-taught, one-man-band website owner/designer/coder/developer I was surprised to realise, upon reading the book, that I was not the 'target audience' for it. I think its more for the middle-men and consultants of big organisations who want to plan a project to the nth degree before a big budget is blown on it.

Because of my hands-on experience, I found that this book merely gave me formal names for many of the processes and aspects of Information Architecture (IA) that I had been implementing already. Despite this, however, I learned a lot from this book. It rounded-off aspects of the topic that I had previously overlooked. It filled some holes and inspired me to make many changes to the information structure of my website.

Unfortunately these gems of knowledge were buried within a lot of waffle. Furthermore, the whole of the first section is pure waffle - which is very frustrating for someone who is eager to learn new practices.

THIS IS AN 'OK BOOK' and you can avoid some of the waffle that I suffered by making the following modifications:
(i) Remove Chapter One (you don't need to read these 15 pages that include waffle on "Why Information Architecture Matters" and two & a half pages on "What Isn't Information Archicture" etc.),
(ii) Remove Chapter Two. It, for example, includes a page titled "Do We Need Information Architects?". It then follows on with 4 more,pointless, pages that provide a thorough list of professions and skills that are related IA! This chapter ends with the message "Now it's time to delve into the guts of IA...so, roll up your sleeves and dig in". The next one starts with "...but before we jump into the actual "stuff" of IA..." -AAARGH!
(iii) So rip out chapter 3 or you'll rip out your hair!
(iv) Next, read chapter 9. (It contains key info that is constantly refered-to throughout the earlier chapters).
(v) Then carry on reading from chapter 4 - Where you actually start learning about actual "stuff" of IA.

This book is 'OK'. It would be so much better if they had structured the information within it a bit better and stripped out about two thirds of the content.

Theory, practice, and a little evangelism too, 19 Feb 2007
When I first told people I was reviewing this book, there was often a blank look. When I explained what information architecture was, then there was invariably a look of pity that passed across their faces. It appears that many people haven't a clue what information architecture actually is, and when they find out, wish they still didn't.

Well, this book has shown me the light. And I'm here to share it with you. Hallelujah, and so forth.

Information is all around us, and thankfully for much of it we have had plenty of time to work out a sensible way or organising it. When you look at a map, you understand the conventions, you know north is going to be up, you know there will be a scale, and so on. So much so, that when those conventions aren't there, if, for example, you are looking at a mappa mundi, you are completely thrown.

A bigger example is that of libraries. We are all used to some form of organisation in libraries - we know that related subjects will be near each other, that we can look this up and go straight to the shelf we want.

This is all well and good, and librarians, such as the authors of this book, have had many years to improve this system, to impose some sort of order on the chaos of so much information. The problem comes, however, when we consider the new sources of information that have exploded over the last 20 years or so. These electronic systems, and the greatest of these is of course the internet, provide completely new challenges - challenges we can start to try and tackle using principles and lessons learnt from other methods of organisation that have been developed elsewhere, but which will ultimately need to be solved in ways we cannot yet fully grasp.

This is where this book comes in. This third edition gives a novice like myself a good grounding in the philosophy behind information architecture, and proceeds to show how this can help in the design of large web sites. Coming from both a web development and a project management background, I felt a sense of relief that the vague concepts I was trying to use were at least recognised elsewhere, and had been developed far beyond what I had been able to. I suspect anyone who has had to grapple with how to display information to users will get a similar feeling when reading this book.

However, the philosophy and semantics are only part of this book. More important is the techniques it describes to actually implement information architecture - both the process, and the likely pitfalls that will be faced in a commercial environment. The formalised process is a good guide to anyone working in this area. (Mind, I would say that - I'm a project manager, so I think processes are intrinsically beautiful...)

These sections of the book, in addition to the examples at the end, provide anyone interested in how to use information architecture to improve their website with the tools they need. There is, however, more to this book.

Information architecture is a very young field. Part of this book is a primer for anyone interested in information architecture as a career, or part of a career. It sets out what, in the opinion of these authors, is a set of ground rules for how to be an information architect - the ethics, what to learn, what tools to use. It follows this with a set of short essays on how to actually sell the concept of IA, because a young discipline needs to carve out its niche in the world, bit by bit, organisation by organisation. It needs people to become enthused by this book, or by others, to take part in the work of popularising IA, to take part in the ongoing work of defining what IA actually is - as a new area of work, there are still many competing views on what it actually is, how it should work, and this book provides only one view of that.

But more importantly, this book shows us that there is still a lot of work to be done in creating a shared set of tools and techniques for navigating this new, vast information resource that we have created. This isn't about making sure commercial websites will make more money, though it will do that. It's not about making people feel happier about their user experience, though it will do that too. It's about making sure we are not overwhelmed, swamped by the sheer volume of data out there. It's about making sure we can find the information we need, and only the information we need, when we want it. It is, in essence, an expression of egalitarianism, the same egalitarianism that drove the internet in its earliest days. If we want to make as much information as possible available, it is ultimately worthless if only a small, trained few can actually find what they need. We need to build the systems that will ensure everyone is able to get to where they need to be.

In short, we need to make sure that the new generation, those who have grown up with the internet a ubiquitous reality, use the best techniques we have had for handling previous information systems, and combine them with completely new ones to create a truly accessible web, one that enables users to get to where they want to be.

So yes, read this book. Use the techniques it talks about. It will make your websites better. But more excitingly, it will let you take part in defining what the map and compass of the internet will actually look like.

Thought provoking book, 27 Jan 2006
The book has many good areas to stimulate thought on the some of the things you should be considering when building applications. Some areas such as librarian practices will have little use in every day work.

Not really a reference book for building usable applications, more of a good night time read.

But for those of you who believe that usability is a big issue that many people overlook, you'll find a friend in this book.

Rather Old, Rather Tired, 12 Jun 2004
This was possibly the first book to use the words "information architecture" in its title that most people ever encountered. It's since become one of the defining IA texts. However, it has not aged very well at all. The discipline of IA has evoloved rapidly over the intervening years, and the view this book has of the field is really now only one facet of it - essentially that of libriarianship and information organisation rather than the wider activities of interaction design and "user experience" that IA has now widened into.

However, as a good, if rather boring introduction to some concepts that budding information architects will need, it's a marginally worthwhile read. The polar bear on the cover is rather a good choice of animal in this case.

Excellent overview - second edition required!, 04 Nov 2002
For someone fairly new to the area, I can't recommend this book enough.
The book is well researched and written in an accessible style - sometimes not an easy thing to do in an area like this.
A couple of minor points:
- The book actually gives some useful pointers for IA for Intranets as well as 'the web' - this should be made more clear
- I don't feel that the book gives adequate information on site maps
- Some of the illustrations look old - this has the result of the book looking like it's out of date - it isn't!

These are minor gripes, however, and should not distract you from buying this book.
But please, 4 years on, can we have a second edition??

Really good. A must have for jQuery beginners, 05 Sep 2008
"Learning jQuery" is a great complement to jQuery's official documentation, having a nice and clean structure all the times within the book

The book is divided in ten very illustrative chapters containing code samples, and excellent comments related to what is being presented. It also assumes that you have never had any contact with jQuery, but have some knowledge of JavaScript.

Of course most of this information can be found on the Official Documentation, but in my opinion, it's a big puzzle, and you need to find most of the pieces of it, and will always start from the edges, when you sometimes need the middle of it. Those who tried to use it before, will know what I'm talking about, and see that this book is a must if you want to use jQuery on your applications.

I have learned a lot with this book, and although I was working with jQuery for some time, it was very good to recycle everything I knew as well as understand some technical points about why I was doing it that way.



Purely indispensable, 08 Jul 2008
Packt sent me a copy of "Learning jQuery" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. jQuery is a javascript library that I have been using on and off and was delighted to be given a chance to review this book and have a chance to read through and learn about jQuery in a less urgent manner than I had initially.

With a tag-line of "Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" and some 376 pages long (split into 10 chapters, along with three appendices) the book excels at fulfilling that promise.

From the chapter on Getting Started through selectors (css, dom, xpath), Chaffer and Swedberg examine and show how to use jQuery for animations, ajax and manipulating tables to the all important client-side form validation with disarmingly concise eloquence and skill. They also detail how to use and develop jQuery Plug-ins.

Any of the required server-side code examples, for the AJAX chapter, are in PHP but that doesn't make the book any less relevant or more specialised towards PHP - it should be trivial to rework them for any language.

The authors use an example based approach and this works very well as they continue to progressively enhance each example with additional features and functionality - you can really see their shopping cart and image carousel examples really build up into very well formed examples of what can be done with jQuery.

If you haven't already been turned on to jQuery by it's excellent on-line documentation and fluent API (method chaining), this is the book that will do it.

There is one caveat though: "Learning jQuery" was written for jQuery v1.1 and published in June 2007; version 1.2 of jQuery was released four months later with some substantial changes to the API.
This doesn't matter all that much to be honest; obviously this book doesn't cover what's available in v1.2 but until there's a second edition of this book (and wouldn't that be great?) you won't find a better book on the subject.


What you need on jquery!, 14 Feb 2008
First I will have to state, that this is my first and only book on the subject. Compared to most books I have read recently, this is far the most well written book: I hate books where the author doesn't take the time to narrow down his message to the reader. In this case the authors did a really good job. It isn't perfect, but they still did a very good job. If they made a more detailed index I would give this book 5 star and send a free copy to Bill Gates :-) - I'am a .Net freek.

Great book but..., 16 Jan 2008
This really is an excellent introduction to the subject. Very well written with loads of code examples. Nearly everything I've wanted to do has been covered somewhere in the book BUT the big problem is finding the information you need.
The index is truly VERY poor e.g several letters have only a single entry - L for example - many others have just a few entries. I could do with a soft copy of the book to search for things more easily. But don't let that put you off, the contents pages are good, and you can always scribble extra entries into the index as you find things!!

Very good, a must have for the jQuery beginner, 27 Nov 2007
Getting started with jQuery does not have to be daunting, this book will definitely help you get started, and show you key techniques to make your code efficient and feature rich.

The book is aimed at jQuery beginners, all it takes is a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, and an understanding of the syntax of JavaScript; no jQuery experience (or any other framework for that matter) is needed or assumed. The book builds up to more advanced topics, but is still mainly aimed at beginners. However, saying that, I consider myself "intermediate" and I learnt a lot of new techniques from this book, and found some of the examples particularly useful.

In general, chapters are well documented and are also backed up by real world examples so you can see the various functions in action. For example, the Chapter entitled "Events - How to pull the trigger" starts off with an overview of jQuery's event handing functionality, then shows a real world example in the form of a style switcher. Chapters are finalised with a useful summary so you can check what you have learnt within the sections.

The book can be read from start to finish, as it is interesting, keeps you engaged, and gives information in a logical order. It contains many useful tips and functions, a lot of which I never knew about until reading the book.

The language used in the book is clear, concise and easy to understand. Tips and important points are highlighted and contain useful tidbits of information. I would have preferred more of these little tips to give the reader a broader understanding of the discussed topics, but they are currently adequate.

Code samples are well formatted and broken down, with added chunks of code emboldened. Live examples are also provided on the accomplying website, which is useful to get a look of what the code samples do. The examples themselves are of a high quality and useful in many real-world situations. Most of the examples are also shown along with screenshots to show you what the code is doing.

The screenshots themselves are a good quality but, being black and white, some are a little hard to understand what is being shown, and a few are slightly blurry. However, the examples themselves are available online so this is not such as big deal.

My only gripes with the book itself are that the headings could be better spaced out to improve legibility, and more importantly the book could have done with a better, bigger, index at the back; it's hard to find certain functions using the current index.

In conclusion, "Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" is a must have for any developer/designer looking to delve into JavaScript frameworks, and is a welcome addition to my reference book shelf. It beats the official jQuery manual hands down in my opinion, simply because everything is explained in much more detail.

A good book by a master in his field, 19 Jun 2008
Eric Meyer is chief aiuthority in this field and this book was perfect for what I needed to know on CSS for part of my degree project on accessibility and tableless design.

Good, but not that good a read., 22 Apr 2008
I can't fault this book for its content. It does indeed cover the A to Z of CSS. However, I personally found it very dry. I went through it from cover to cover, and the examples etc all worked as stated (in comparison to far too many books out there which are full of errors), however, I have had no real urge to return to it for reference since.

I've given it 4 stars because anything less than that would be criminal. However, it didn't engage me like some of the better CSS books out there.

Excellent general text, 31 Jan 2008
Computer text books are rarely as clear, comprehensive and easy to use as this one. Well written, good indexing and well thought out examples.

I went from zero knowledge to being totally at home with CSS using just this book and the odd web search.



Very good Reference for any Web Developer, 28 Nov 2007
The book is big and I think not meant to be read but taken as a reference instead. Basically it is very helpful when you need to fix a display issue or find the exact meaning of any CSS attribute. What I like is the accuracy and the amount of information you can find in this book. I would recommend it for any web developer working on very recent web designs.

An excellent reference, but don't mistake it for an introduction., 02 Aug 2006
In this fantastically detailed book, Eric Meyer explains the basics of css and systematically elaborates on each css property, their scope, and values. Whilst the book is not designed to be read as a guide or an introduction, it does make an excellent reference for those times when you need definitive information on a particular css property.

If you're looking to learn about css, I wouldn't recommend relying on this book alone; buy yourself a real beginner's guide, and maybe get this as a reference tool for when you need to clarify something. As I learnt more about css, I found often found myself flicking through the book and having moments of realisation when paragraph or two would clarify something I'd read elsewhere. That's the sign of a good reference book.

Some people may find the book a little heavy going to begin with. I don't think the book has been designed with the intention that the reader go through it cover to cover in one go. I found that reading a lot of the book at once left me with a lot of questions: these were answered through practical experience with css, and through other, less detailed, introductions. However, I do feel as though the difficulties I had were a result of my lack of understanding rather than any real problem with the book itself; it's still the one book I'll turn to when the others don't answer my questions.

All in all, this is a great book: it won't walk you through your first steps in css, but it does provide exactly what you need when you're lost and need some real answers. If you're new to css, pair this book up with a well-rated introductory text, and you'll be all set to go. For those who have some practical css experience, I'd recommend this as a great reference tool, without hesitation.

Flawed and blinkered, 20 Feb 2007
Preece et al provide a good exposition of usability issues, but look out of their depth when they try to analyse problems from an software engineering perspective. Much of their analysis is either truism or superficial. They then move back onto the more comfortable territory of human-computer interface techniques. There is much in the book that is useful for software engineers to hear, but the poor understanding that the writers have of the realities of commercial software engineering means that it is unlikely that the software engineers will take the lessons seriously, even though there is a pressing need for them to understand what they're doing wrong.

Specific criticisms I have are that Preece et al;

1 - Don't understand the nature of the software engineering lifecycle models, and have a very naive view of how usability engineering might be incorporated.

2 - Have a completely inadequate understanding of software testing (and such an understanding is crucial if usability professionals are to get involved in software developments).

3 - Don't understand the nature of requirements in the development process, seemingly viewing them as a subjective wish list on the part of the end users.

Usability students who take this book at face value will be in for a shock if they ever try to apply its lessons in commercial software development. They would lose credibility within hours, and be quickly bounced off the project.

Why do I give the book 2 stars after all the above? Well, it is sound when the authors are on home turf, and if you're experienced enough in software engineering to ignore their hopeless wandering around in that field.

Good, 15 Oct 2004
This was a book that was on my reading list at Uni. I am really pleased I purchased this book (there is a new edition out). Its very useful guide to HCI and not only assisting my in my HCI module but in my dissertation to give me a good grounding to Usability principles.

Recommended if you are interested in this field, also look at Jakob Nielsen's HCI book range.

V. Good considering subject, 19 Jan 2004
I learnt an entire degree level module in about four hours from this book. It's not a subject I'm interested in but the book is surprisingly easy to read given this.

I gave it 4 as some of the things that I would like to have seen e.g. web design information is very limited. There was only one page that I came across specifically on this, however the general principles of Interaction design apply anyway and these are well presented.

Interaction Design - Beyond Human Computer Interaction, 06 Oct 2003
I would highly recommend this book to anyone studying Human Computer Interaction. It is informative and yet interesting, though a bit theoretical. It would be ideal to use another book with more practical approach to compliment it.

Balanced, yet comprehensive information source, 20 Apr 2002
There is an equal balance of the psycology behind computer interaction, and pratctical insight.
The book covers a broad area witthin the relm of computer arts, web production, and multimedia.
A real asset i've found, to degree level study.

In this book about the darker side of technology's impact on our lives, Alan Cooper begins by explaining that unlike other devices throughout history, computers have a "meta function": an unwanted, unforeseen option that users may accidentally invoke with what they thought was a normal keystroke. Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process.

Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.)

Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book.

Even with that in mind, the central qu