Microsoft Silverlight Books

Fantastic, as long as you know what you are getting into

This book is an excellent introduction into the do's and don'ts of web application interfacing. Just to set the record straight, this is NOT a book on designing general websites. In most cases, it won't help you design a simple blog or a homepage for your company. This is because the book does not proclaim to be a "Web Design Bible". I think the title is somewhat misleading as some may argue that every visual component of a website (colors, layout, headings, font, etc.) is part of the collective 'interface'. While that may be true, this book focuses on web applications. Things like online shopping carts, email clients, and other interactive components of websites are spotlighted and paid generous attention to.

Now that I got that out of the way, I would like to go on to detailing why the book is so great. The book is broken into 6 Principles:

Make It Direct
Keep it Lightweight
Stay on the Page
Provide an Invitation
Use Transitions
React Immediately

Every Principle is broken down into sub-principles, each of which lists various patterns. The patterns help you accomplish the goal of the Principle. For each pattern, plenty of examples are given that demonstrate how to and how not to use the pattern. Real world examples are spotlighted including some from sites like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and friends.

While reading through the book, I found several tips in each chapter that I could immediately apply to my own websites and projects. The In-Page Editing and Overlay sections were especially useful. I'm in the process of reading the last two chapters and can already see myself implementing some of the suggestions the authors are recommending.

The only complaint I have is that the Drag and Drop section was a little dry and repetitive, but, to the authors' credit, so is the nature of the subject.

I would recommend this book to anyone building or maintaining any type of web application or interactive website.

psulover901
07 July, 2010

Great summation of current UI patterns in a well written and laid out manner. Definitely not dry reading.

Designing Web interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil is a nice encapsulation on many of the current UI trends for web applications. While the desktop area was dominated years ago with industry standards, and are only now taking on a new revolution with disconnected web products like Adobe Air or new UI frameworks like WPF, the web is still in its infancy regarding UI design. Especially now with AJAX it seems like every year brings on a new set of standards of how UI is supposed to work on the web. This book discusses a very current set of established patterns in a well written and clear format.

While there are several books that speak of web UI and interaction, and thousands of websites, what Scott and Theresa really do well is talk about what patters are in current use, when they are appropriate and many cases where they might not be. They break them down into very manageable sections where you can quickly spot the patter that will work for you. Unlike other patterns books this is filled with hundreds of screenshots detailing every aspect and a lot of great examples. This is not dry reading.

They both draw from their past experience, often showing examples of what worked and what didn't in previous commercial sites they have worked on (like Yahoo), and comment about how things might have been implemented better. They show the various UI patterns in great detail with screenshots and many of the transitions. Often they point out popular websites where a fairly good pattern was implemented for the sheer "coolness" of it, however, in production it simply didn't work and they should have opted for a more subtle pattern. In other cases they point out where changing from one design to another, avoiding a single click such as in Digg, resulted in doubling their user interaction.

This was a great addition to my bookshelf and definitely something I will refer to often.


Matthew Penner
09 February, 2010

Good reference book

If you are a web designer or developer with expert coding experience, then this book can be a handy reference. This book is full of current pattern options where the authors, Bill Scott and Theresa Neil thoroughly go through each example into easy to read detail that include plenty of graphics. They go into great detail comparing which patterns work well and why other options do not.

If you are someone starting out with web design, this book can still be an asset to your library. It doesn't tell you how to code but it does give insight on how sites are built and why they are built in a certain fashion.

As a graphic designer coming from the print world and a novice to the web side of design, I picked up some good insight from this book. It helps when planning a site and discussing options when working with a programmer.

A. Streicher
21 March, 2010

Very useful patterns

The full color screen-shots and in-depth analysis make this a fine book. The best parts are the side-bars that summarize the key takeaway points of each section. I also like the pattern-language - "overlay" - it could mean a few different things depending on who you ask, but in this context it is described as a specific concept and differentiated from "inlay" for example. I like that this book actually gets quite technical, yet does not include any real source code or steer you towards any particular technology/framework/language. We need more books like this - teach us about the "why" but leave the "how" up to us.

David W. Martines
07 June, 2010

Good as a reference book

I was waiting for more from this book. It's nothing more than an reference book on some design patterns.

introfini
08 October, 2009