Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences


Jesmond Allen - 2012
    Treat it as the UX expert on your bookshelf that you can read from cover-to-cover, or to dip into as the need arises, regardless of whether you have 'UX' in your job title or not.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web


Paul Adams - 2011
    It is moving away from its current structure of documents and pages linked together, and towards a new structure that is built around people. This is a profound change that will affect how we create business strategy, design, marketing, and advertising. The reason for this shift is simple. For tens of thousands of years we've been social animals. The web, which is only 20 years old, is simply catching up with offline life.From travel to news to commerce, smart businesses are reorienting their efforts around people-around the social behavior of their customers and potential customers. In order to be successful, businesses will need to understand how people are connected, how their social network influences them, how the people closest to them influence them the most, and how it's more important for marketers to focus on small, connected groups of friends rather than looking for overly influential individuals.This book pulls together the latest research from leading universities and technology companies to describe how people are connected, and how ideas and brand messages spread through social networks. It shows readers how to rebuild their business around social behavior, and create products that people tell their friends about.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia


Anthony M. Townsend - 2013
    A century ago, the telegraph and the mechanical tabulator were used to tame cities of millions. Today, cellular networks and cloud computing tie together the complex choreography of mega-regions of tens of millions of people.In response, cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity. In Chicago, GPS sensors on snow plows feed a real-time "plow tracker" map that everyone can access. In Zaragoza, Spain, a "citizen card" can get you on the free city-wide Wi-Fi network, unlock a bike share, check a book out of the library, and pay for your bus ride home. In New York, a guerrilla group of citizen-scientists installed sensors in local sewers to alert you when stormwater runoff overwhelms the system, dumping waste into local waterways.As technology barons, entrepreneurs, mayors, and an emerging vanguard of civic hackers are trying to shape this new frontier, Smart Cities considers the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings of them all while offering a new civics to guide our efforts as we build the future together, one click at a time.

Transit Maps of the World


Mark Ovenden - 2003
    Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer's new bible, the transport enthusiast's dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who's ever traveled in a city.

The Printmaking Bible: The Complete Guide to Materials and Techniques


Ann d'Arcy Hughes - 2008
    At over 400 pages and packed with 1,000 full-color photos and illustrations, The Printmaking Bible is the definitive resource to the ins-and-outs of every variety of serious printmaking technique practiced today.In-depth instructions are accompanied by profiles that show how working artists create their prints. Historical information, troubleshooting tips, and an extensive resource section provide more invaluable tools. Perfect for students, artists, print aficionados, and collectors, this is truly the ultimate volume for anyone involved in this creative and influential art form.

Three Birds Renovations


Erin Cayless - 2019
    Today, with many incredible house transformations under their toolbelt, they're a power trio turning neighbourhood ugly ducklings into swans.If you lust over images of beautiful homes but feel stuck when it comes to your own space, these 'birds' have your back. The book is packed with gorgeous details from their projects, friendly words of encouragement and more than 400 reno tips to help you avoid budget blow-outs, manage trades and timelines, and style without stress. Whether you're starting small or going all-in with a whole-home reno, this is destined to become one of the most useful books you own.Turn your reno dreams into reality!

Building Maintainable Software


Joost Visser - 2015
    Be part of the solution. With this practical book, you'll learn 10 easy-to-follow guidelines for delivering software that's easy to maintain and adapt. These guidelines have been derived from analyzing hundreds of real-world systems.Written by consultants from the Software Improvement Group (SIG), this book provides clear and concise explanations, with advice for turning the guidelines into practice. Examples are written in Java, but this guide is equally useful for developers working in other programming languages.10 Coding Guidelines- Write short units of code: limit the length of methods and constructors- Write simple units of code: limit the number of branch points per method- Write code once, rather than risk copying buggy code- Keep unit interfaces small by extracting parameters into objects- Separate concerns to avoid building large classes- Couple architecture components loosely- Balance the number and size of top-level components in your code- Keep your codebase as small as possible- Automate tests for your codebase- Write clean code, avoiding "code smells" that indicate deeper problemsWhy you should read this bookTaken in isolation, the guidelines presented in this book are well-known. In fact, many well-known tools for code analysis check a number of the guidelines presented here. The following three characteristics set this book apart from other books on software development: We have selected the ten most important guidelines from experience.We teach how to comply with these ten guidelines.We present statistics and examples from real-world systems.This book is part our Training on Software Maintainability - and subsequent Certification on Quality Software Development program. For more information about this program, please contact training@sig.eu.

Art Nouveau


Gabriele Fahr-Becker - 1982
    The impressive photographs of works from all visual arts movements are at the center of these richly illustrated volumes. The books successfully provide an overview of the artistic diversity of the individual periods, and they couldn't have been written and illustrated any more clearly. The informative and interesting texts have been written by renowned authors from the fields of history, architecture and art history, providing a multifaceted view of each period. These books are a real pleasure for anyone with an interest in art.

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement


Eric Redmond - 2012
    As a modern application developer you need to understand the emerging field of data management, both RDBMS and NoSQL. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks takes you on a tour of some of the hottest open source databases today. In the tradition of Bruce A. Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, this book goes beyond your basic tutorial to explore the essential concepts at the core each technology. Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak and Postgres. With each database, you'll tackle a real-world data problem that highlights the concepts and features that make it shine. You'll explore the five data models employed by these databases-relational, key/value, columnar, document and graph-and which kinds of problems are best suited to each. You'll learn how MongoDB and CouchDB are strikingly different, and discover the Dynamo heritage at the heart of Riak. Make your applications faster with Redis and more connected with Neo4J. Use MapReduce to solve Big Data problems. Build clusters of servers using scalable services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Discover the CAP theorem and its implications for your distributed data. Understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and when you can use them to your advantage. Use multiple databases in concert to create a platform that's more than the sum of its parts, or find one that meets all your needs at once.Seven Databases in Seven Weeks will take you on a deep dive into each of the databases, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to choose the ones that fit your needs.What You Need: To get the most of of this book you'll have to follow along, and that means you'll need a *nix shell (Mac OSX or Linux preferred, Windows users will need Cygwin), and Java 6 (or greater) and Ruby 1.8.7 (or greater). Each chapter will list the downloads required for that database.

JavaScript: The Good Parts


Douglas Crockford - 2008
    This authoritative book scrapes away these bad features to reveal a subset of JavaScript that's more reliable, readable, and maintainable than the language as a whole--a subset you can use to create truly extensible and efficient code.Considered the JavaScript expert by many people in the development community, author Douglas Crockford identifies the abundance of good ideas that make JavaScript an outstanding object-oriented programming language-ideas such as functions, loose typing, dynamic objects, and an expressive object literal notation. Unfortunately, these good ideas are mixed in with bad and downright awful ideas, like a programming model based on global variables.When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the language of the Web by default, making its popularity almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Crockford finally digs through the steaming pile of good intentions and blunders to give you a detailed look at all the genuinely elegant parts of JavaScript, including:SyntaxObjectsFunctionsInheritanceArraysRegular expressionsMethodsStyleBeautiful featuresThe real beauty? As you move ahead with the subset of JavaScript that this book presents, you'll also sidestep the need to unlearn all the bad parts. Of course, if you want to find out more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, simply consult any other JavaScript book.With JavaScript: The Good Parts, you'll discover a beautiful, elegant, lightweight and highly expressive language that lets you create effective code, whether you're managing object libraries or just trying to get Ajax to run fast. If you develop sites or applications for the Web, this book is an absolute must.

Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide


Charles Wyke-Smith - 2005
    Stylin with CSS teaches you everything you need to know start using CSS in your web development work, from the basics of markup of your content and styling text, through to creating multi-column page layouts without the use of tables. Learn how to create interface components, such as drop-down menus, navigation links, and animated graphical buttons, using only CSS no JavaScript required. Discover how to design code that will work on the latest standard-compliant browsers, while working around the quirks of the older browsers. With a mastery of CSS, your web design capabilities will move to a new level, and everything you need to know to get your started and build your skills is right here in this book. You ll be stylin in no time!"

PHP for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)


Larry Ullman - 2001
    It covers topics such as Zend Engine, XML support, SQLite, and others.

Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS


Jonathan Snook - 2011
    There is no library within here for you to download or install. SMACSS is a way to examine your design process and as a way to fit those rigid frameworks into a flexible thought process. It is an attempt to document a consistent approach to site development when using CSS. And really, who isn’t building a site with CSS these days?!Get to know Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application


37 Signals - 2006
    At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color


Johannes Itten - 1961
    Subjective feelings and objective color principles are described in detail and clarified by color reproductions.