“A lovely collection of blog posts about all the hidden stuff in your city. Why lampposts are shaped the way they are. Why manhole covers are round. What the markings on sidewalks mean. It’s a great reader – every ‘chapter’ is really just a blog post or podcast episode, so you can read 4-5 of them…”
“This is a good and necessary book, but I can’t figure out how to handle it. There’s simply a lot of information in it, and it’s all so good, that it prompts anxiety in the reader as to how they can possible remember/process it all. The book is exactly what the title says: 100 short vignettes about…”
“This is a fun book that celebrates the packaging and advertising art of the early Atari video games of the 80s. And this is important, because – let’s face it – those games sucked . The graphics were horrible and abstract, and what you were seeing on the screen had very little relation to…the…”
“This book was not what I expected. I thought I was getting a book on information organization and architecture…but that’s not what this is. This is an art book. It’s a collection of the ways people have tried to express hierarchical information in tree forms for thousands of years. It’s a picture…”
“Given the title, I’m a little embarrassed to say I thought this book was about content management. It’s not – it’s about the use of metadata in data warehousing. I stuck with it though because it discussed an aspect of data warehousing with which I wasn’t familiar. It’s dated, but well-written and…”
“This book was written by two board game experts, one of which is a professor at the NYU Game Center, which I didn’t even know was a thing. The book breaks down games into patterns – the ‘building blocks’ of the title. It groups them into categories: Game Structure Turn Order and Structure Actions…”
“A magisterial history of the Hoover Dam, all the way from the problems of the late 1800s that it was meant to solve, through the arguments during its planning, to the construction and beyond (in fact, they don’t even start building the dam until halfway through the book). The Hoover Dam was an…”
“ I was left wondering if I was the right audience. A lot of it felt pretty obvious, but I’ve been doing diagrams like this for a while. I endorse the theme of the book - we need to diagram mental models before we start talking about UI and writing code. ”
“ Hard to review, because it’s 15-years-old, but a nice look back at what CMS was in 2002. It drifts a lot – talks about governance, content strategy, and design – but perhaps that’s how ‘content management’ was perceived back then? ”
“An absolutely magisterial work that explores every last corner of the CSS spec. The advancements that have come along since I learned CSS are amazing – you can almost write executable code in CSS now. This book explores every edge case, no matter absurd, to probe every last corner of the spec. I…”
“I’m still struggling to find the book I want around data science. I’ve learned that there are two levels: KNOWING data science DOING data science This book is about the second one. Make no mistake, this is a ‘statistical computation’ manual. This shows you how to find statistical answers using…”
“This is a book in favor of intelligent design – of the idea of creationism – which I’ve historically been very skeptical of. The promise is right there in the title: Darwinism, or naturalistic evolution, is at odds with Christianity and must be ‘defeated.’ The author is a law professor at at UC…”
“ A good look at how to componentize a design. Lots of emphasis on people and process. I would have liked some code-level analysis, like how you actually manage the markup for flexibility and consistency. ”
“Not quite what I expected. I thought this was approaching systems design from a development standpoint, but it’s more from a hosting/infrastructure standpoint. Specifically, it’s about using Docker, Kubernetes, and such to extend and change the functionality of existing systems. I skimmed the…”
“This is a comprehensive book, to the point where you would kind of need to read it in a group, or make it a point to read it very slowly, synthesizing and integrating as you go. Just reading it from start to finish probably won’t accomplish much. This book is an examination of how human perceive a…”
“Wonderful novel about a woman who has pushed the world away due to trauma in her past, and who has to rejoin mainstream society in order to confront her demons. This is normally way outside my area of interest, but I read it for a book club and I’m quite glad a did. It’s always interesting, and…”
“I’m rating this five stars because it accomplished everything it set out to do, but books like this really defy rating. This is a procedural book. You’re meant to have this open while you do stuff. There’s not a lot of words – it’s largely screencaps and code listings. Books like this also become…”
“Ihis is a book about fonts (or type or typefaces – I’ve learned there are subtle variations in the definitions of each, but I can’t remember what they are). The book is a series of anecdotes about fonts/types. each chapter is short – you can read one in 3-4 minutes, but they’re all pretty…”
“ A very deep, theoretical book on the design process, and on matching a solution to a problem. This one isn’t for the faint of heart. It attempts to distill the design process to math, almost. I got a little lost towards the end, but I love a deep dissection of a process like this, so it was fun. ”
“Honestly, I just didn’t get it. This book was described in near-mythical terms, but it seemed tedious to me. Maybe I’m just not used to hardware design, or I’m not an engineer anymore – I don’t know what, but the over-arching point of this was lost. There was some philosophy toward the end of…”
“ This wasn’t for me. I missed the word ‘beginner’ in the subtitle. There are chapters explaining the basics of HTTP. And of programming in general. Also, it’s full of cutesy drawings and…stuff. This is good book for the right audience. I just wasn’t it. ”
The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
