iRomin

Originally submitted at O’Reilly

Despite all of the UI toolkits available today, it's still not easy to design good application interfaces. This bestselling book is one of the few reliable sources to help you navigate through the maze of design options. By capturing UI best practices and reusable ideas as design patterns, <…

Designing Interfaces

Great collection of UI Design Patterns

Pros: Helpful examples, Easy to understand, Well-written

Best Uses: Expert, Intermediate

Describe Yourself: Developer

The Application marketplace is getting competitive and “First Impression Is the Last Impression” is increasingly the scenario, especially when people are looking at several applications. Given that context, it is extremely important to get the User Experience as people would expect it.

Jenifer Tidwell has done a great job by collecting together a list of User Interface Design Patterns. The author has classified them in different areas like navigatation, page organization, complex data representation, input forms and much more. In each of these areas, the book gives you an overview of different patterns, good and bad examples via screenshots so that you can immediately understand the point.

I particularly liked that the book has chapters now on Social Media and Mobile Design Patterns. If you are planning on taking your existing website to a mobile world, go through the patterns here.

This book is ideally positioned towards experienced developers and they will be able to appreciate the points more because they would have experienced it when releasing several applications and/or on receiving customer feedback about the user experience. Having said, it can be a good reference even in an educational environment.

If you are working with a team of developers, the collection here is well suited for your team to understand and be on the same page when it comes to delivering the user experience. A good checklist of things to look for while developing your user experience.

I recommend this book if you are serious about getting the user experience right.

(legalese)

Originally submitted at O’Reilly

If you don't know about the new features available in HTML5, now's the time to find out. This book provides practical information about how and why the latest version of this markup language will significantly change the way you develop for the Web. HTML5: Up & Running careful…

HTML5: Up and Running

Best resource to get started with HTML5

Pros: Well-written, Concise, Easy to understand, Helpful examples

Best Uses: Novice, Intermediate, Student, Expert

Describe Yourself: Developer

HTML5: Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim is a great guide to get started with HTML5. The author uses his knowledge to bring us a book that sifts through the standard and explains just about enough to get started on all the features.

The book starts off with a history of HTML5 and it makes us appreciate what really goes on in the standards committee. Then it covers the major features of HTML5, how to detect it in current browsers. Then each feature is taken up in a chapter of its own. There is Canvas, Video, GeoLocation, Storage, Offline, Microdata formats and so on.

The writing style is simple and far from boring, with several pieces of information thrown in that gives a good overall perspective.

What I particularly liked about the book were its simple examples and how the author has covered each feature of HTML5 in its chapter. After a few initial chapters, I am of the opinion that you could get into any chapter independently if you are really short of time. The coverage of a library like Modernizr is also useful to get started immediately with using the features in your favorite browser.

I would have liked to see more coverage on Web Workers but I guess the standard is still being worked on. As the standards evolve, a newer edition would be needed but that is just the world of standards that we are living in.

Overall, I am very pleased with the book. And I would strongly recommend it to anyone, who wants to get started on HTML5.

(legalese)