Darren Provine at Rowan University

Interesting Books for Web Programming

This is a list of books which may be of interest to students taking Web Programming. None is required reading; you won't be tested on this material by me. Most have nothing to do with the World Wide Web at all, but are about design and layout and presentation. They're all available in the Rowan Library, but don't check all of them out at once.

You don't need to read any of these to do well in the class; but I promise that if you read all of them, you'll see the world in a new way.

Web Design in a Nutshell, by Jennifer Niederst

This one is about the WWW, obviously.

The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman

Also available as The Psychology of Everyday Things, this book discusses why some things are easy to use and some are hard to use, by looking at what people think about when they see an object (or, by extension, a web page). One example concerned a faucet with a round knob: almost everyone who tried to use it turned the knob. Nothing came out: it was supposed to be pushed. Had the handle been a lever, there'd have been no confusion.

There are also many examples of good designs. His evaluation of a Lego motorcycle kit includes the remark that it's `so well designed even an adult can assemble it without instructions.'

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte

This is about how to make a good graphic, and, what is arguably more important, how to evaluate a graphic and see how good it is. I don't agree completely with everything he says, but this is definitely worth reading.

He says, for example, that if you divide the amount of ink in a diagram which actually represents data by the total ink used, you'll get a number between 0 and 1. The closer it is to 1, the better.

One of his (bad) examples includes a diagram which is almost entirely pointless decoration, using five colors and over 18 square inches to represent only five numbers. Worse, the graphic colors in some of the empty space, and leaves the region representing actual data plain white, thus misleading the reader into looking at the wrong thing. When looking at the diagram, I can't understand the numbers; it's the only diagram ever with negative content.

Another graphic represents over 2200 numbers in a mere 21 square inches, using only black, white, and grey. The result conveys a wealth of information and is perfectly clear.

Understanding the relevance of a book such as this to web programming is left as an exercise for the student.