As previously mentioned, Mike Gunderloy has written a follow-up to his book Coder to Developer. Because of my review of that book, Mike was kind enough to send me a free copy of the new one.
Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer focuses on designing good user interfaces for Microsoft Windows. So although this time there’s no .NET emphasis, if you’re looking for cross platform GUI design advice look elsewhere. In my opinion he’s made the right choice here – catering the various toolkits and desktop environments available for multiple platforms would make this book HUGE, and the human interface guidelines published by the various projects (e.g. Apple and GNOME) would make such an effort largely redundant1.
As with Coder to Developer, this book is not a revelation – most of it’s content can be found elsewhere (not that Mike is a plagarist!). What he does do is distill this information into a very readable form, and presents clear examples of what does and doesn’t work in a GUI. He also covers the basics of designing a web interface (although this is a subject in itself) and gives a preview of what’s coming in terms of UI design in Longhorn and Avalon.
Although I found the book interesting, having now read it I probably wouldn’t have bought it for myself (not that I did of course), but I would recommend it (in fact I have) to both inexperienced and non-UI-focused developers. The former because it will set them on the right road, and the latter because people who don’t develop UIs on regular basis can make some very strange design choices and so this will help them get back on the right road.
With this book – and its predecessor – Mike is doing a very good job of showing common development tasks and functions in an approachable way. Maybe not so valuable for experienced developers, but essential for the inexperienced, and I look forward to the next in the series (I’m assuming there will be one) if only to recommend it to colleagues and associates as I have done with these two.
1 As an aside, I would like to see a book on cross platform development with the GTK+ and/or QT (and other) toolkits. If anyone knows of one…
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