This is my summary of the book “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Contrary to what the title may suggest, it’s not a “vegetarian book” defending some variant of the argument “animals are cute, don’t kill them”: it’s a book about factory farming (it’s true that one of the conclusions is that you essentially have [...]
Archives for Book summaries
Book summary: Living with Complexity
This is my summary of the book “Living with Complexity”, by Donald A. Norman (of “The Design of Everyday Things” fame, among others). It’s a book about how it’s wrong to consider complexity (in design) a bad thing. I have skipped a fair deal of the text in the summary, mostly because it wasn’t applicable [...]
Book summary: Designing with the Mind in Mind
This is my summary of “Designing with the Mind in Mind” by Jeff Johnson, a book about user interface design that explores the reasons why those principles work. Introduction How valuable are UI design guidelines depends on who applies them. They often describe goals, not actions, so they can’t be followed like a recipe. They [...]
Book summary and review: Bodies
This is my summary of “Bodies”, by Susie Orbach. It’s a book about the relationship to our body and how it affects us and our life. As this book is sort of similar to “Who are we” in the sense that there are several general points being made and most of the book are stories [...]
Book summary: Envisioning information
These are my notes about “Envisioning information” by Edward R. Tufte. It’s not a normal summary because most of the content needs the graphics, plots and figures being discussed. The following notes cover the whole book (six chapters). EDIT: Manuela wrote another, easier to read summary. Escaping flatland The methods in this book work to [...]
Book summary: Pragmatic Thinking & Learning (III)
This is the third and last part of my summary of Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, by Andy Hunt. See parts one and two on this same blog. This part will cover chapters “Gain experience”, “Manage Focus” and “Beyond Expertise”. Gain experience Your brain is made to learn by exploring and building mental models on your [...]
Book summary: Pragmatic Thinking & Learning (II)
This is the second part of my summary of Andy Hunt’s “Pragmatic Thinking & Learning”. See the first part on this blog. This part will cover chapters ”Get in Your Right Mind”, “Debug Your Mind” and ”Learn Deliberately”. Get in Your Right Mind A good way to involve your brain more is to use more [...]
Book summary: Pragmatic Thinking & Learning
This is the first part of my summary of “Pragmatic Thinking & Learning“, by Andy Hunt. It’s a book about how the brain works and how to take more advantage of it. It explores many interesting topics, like learning, focusing, the brain modes of operation, etc. Do note that I’ll skip many techniques/lessons in the [...]
Book summary: Prototyping (II)
This is the second half of my summary for the book “Prototyping” by Todd Zaki Warfel. See the first part on this blog. It will cover chapters 4-12, which talk about the guiding principles for prototyping, prototyping tools and how to test your prototype. Principles Most prototyping mistakes come from either (1) building too much [...]
Book summary: Prototyping (I)
This is the first half of my summary for the book “Prototyping” by Todd Zaki Warfel. See my review of the book in Goodreads (one-sentence summary of the review: “a tad disappointing”). It will cover the first three chapters, “The Value of Prototyping”, “The Prototyping Process” and “Five Types of Prototypes”. The second half will [...]
Posts