#

A little over a week ago I finished reading The Design of Everyday Things, a book I had been meaning to read for about a year.

The book is generally quite good. First the bad: at times it seemed that it was too repetitive and periodically needlessly dry. With that said, the book was worthwhile… the author codified many things that may be “common sense” but are not nearly as common as they should be. The book taught me how to be more critical of the design of the things around me, why some faucets are harder to use than others, and why I get lost in phone menus often. And maybe it explains why I still have trouble jumping into vi for more than simple editing. (ducks for cover)

The best part was the plethora of examples throughout the text, often with pictures: real-life examples of good and bad design made the book have much clearer applications.

I hope more people who design things will take the time to read this book. Too often people confuse “ugly” and “unusable”… I don’t mind using ugly software, for example, but if it’s just hard to use, that’s a completely different problem. The author may be a little arrogant at times, but considering how many terrible designs are out there, it’s allowable.

I’m now in the process of reading The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. I’ll write about it when I’m done, it’s quite good so far.

After that I’m going to finally read K&R’s classic book The C Programming Language.

I have ideas for what to read after that, but I’m not going to plan too far in advance…