Karl's Blog

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

I read the whole book even though I was interested in a few chapters. I would fully recommend for almost any level programmers. It starts with the very basics of JS, but it climbs to a good advanced level.

Javascript can be fun and evil, so I strongly recommend you always seek more knowledge on this language. If you read the article about learning jquery or js and realized you’re a great jquery programmer but doesn’t know javascript yet, this is a great book to start with.

A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making on Amazon.com

Strongly recommended for anyone in the field, specially if you’re starting your career on UX or even development, it will put you on the right tracks.

The book is really detailed about every step of a project related with UX design (any software out there). It even gives you a guide on creating proposals for clients, but a lot of that knowledge can be used if you’re part of an internal team.

I mostly enjoyed Chapter 4 and 5, “Project Objectives and Approach” and “Business Requirements”, it’s a great guide for what I believe can be the hardest part of a project.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 on Amazon.com

I started reading this book to see what was new in MVC 3, I’ve been developing with ASP.NET MVC 2 for a while and now I finally had the opportunity to start a new project with MVC 3. Anyway, the book is really good and highly recommended for those getting their hands dirty with MVC 3.

The book goes from basic to some really advanced topics, it doesn’t only explain how to extend but also shows how the MVC 3 framework works inside.

I would spend a little more time on the unit testing chapter, I think it was a little poor on content but there’s a lot of content out there that you can go to get more info.

CSS3 for Web Designers

First of all pay attention to the title, I didn’t and I got a little bit frustrated. It’s for Web Designers, not for developers so it’s kind of basic. It’s good to get an idea of the possibilities that CSS3 can give to you.

Like all books from A Book Apart, it’s quick and basic, sometimes they just feel like a long blog post, but at least you know that it’s a well written blog post. (more…)

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability on Amazon.com

I really liked this book because it gave me really good insights on the best ways to build forms. I shows what to do, what not to do and why.

The structure makes it really easy to read and follow the main ideas. The book is separated in 3 parts: relationship, conversation and appearance.

One thing that I thought it was interesting was how important (talking ux, not design bs) it can be that your forms have good appearance, how much that can affect the efficiency of the form.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Made to stick analyses the aspects that make an idea stick. After an extensive research the authors came up with 6 principles that make an idea stick, and they can be contained in SUCCES (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories). Reading this book was a great experience, it’s very practical and the lessons learned can be used in different areas of my life, but of course in this blog I want to analyze the applications for the web. (more…)

Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

Great book showing a lot of user interface patterns of successful web applications. The hard part is actually reading it since it feels to technical, in my opinion they should have added more stories, not only examples. By that I mean they should tell a story such as “Yahoo used to have this interface and after doing more research they changed to this and this increased their conversions in X%” (It’s just an example, I’m just talking about being more descriptive). (more…)