Archive for January, 2008

My Book Club of One

In my last post I mentioned that I’d just started “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” and planned to read “Refactoring” after that. I have since read them both and at least 1.5 others. I’d actually started my next post when I finished Patterns but due to the aforementioned coupling it never saw the light of day.

After Refactoring I decided to finish another book that I’d skimmed “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” by Alan Cooper. The book makes a lot of good points about the fundamental disconnect between the mental models of the end users and software developers (I know I’ve been guilty of projecting my own level of comfort unto my users). The book makes a strong case for the need of “Interaction Designers” and “Goal-Directed Design”. So much so that after finishing it I went and grabbed a copy of “About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design” by Alan Cooper et al. While I’m still reconciling some of the principles of Goal-Directed Design with Domain-Driven Design (and Test-Driven Development, Object-Oriented Programming, Service-Oriented Architecture, and several other acronyms) About Face reinforces the arguments made by Inmates and really brings to light some of the dunderheaded user interaction decisions we programmers can make.

January 27, 2008 · Anthony D. Green · No Comments
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