Rating: 
Summary: A Verbose Syllabus
Review: This is more of a syllabus with references than an actual textbook. It's even a sensible syllabus; if you want an outline of the important topics in contemporary and historical computer user interfaces, Shneiderman's book will tell you what you need to know. But the utility of this book is unclear; it's not intended to teach the reader how to design interfaces, nor does it teach experimental design and evaluation. At 600+ pages, it's both terse and verbose. Verbose, because of the "let me tell you what I'm going to tell you, tell you, tell you what I've told you" format favored in this kind of overview. Terse because the "tell you" part is a kind of white-washed summary; as soon as a topic is brought up, several references are trotted out, summarized in one or two lines, and then dismissed. I wanted more depth, more case studies, and a higher-level vantage point. Despite a short tour of command lines, including natural language text commands, and a 10 page summary of speech recognition and synthesis-based interfaces, "Designing the User Interface" is almost exclusively about contemporary computer graphical user interface design. Better books on GUI design include Johnson's "GUI Bloopers" and Raskin's "The Humane Interface".
Rating: 
Summary: The bible of UI
Review: This is one of those books every serious programmer should have. Instead of being a book about MFC, or a book about programming a specific platform, this book concentrates on the important philosophies and principals behind programming an efficient and well formed user interface. A book about programming MFC, X-windows is like a book about chess pieces legal moves. This book is just like a book of how to play chess, not the chess tools themselves.
Rating:
Summary: 5 stars as a textbook, but there should be more, much more
Review: This is the third edition of an unavoidable book for anybody involved with human computer interaction (this should include librarians like me who are command-line impaired and completely intolerant of faulty human factors design as well as the techie types who sometimes tolerate "cool" but ill designed interfaces) directly or indirectly, as a end user or a design participant. The only major problem with it is that it is a textbook, written to fit into a given number of pages. This means, alas, that a lot of good stuff from the second edition had to be taken out to fit in new stuff. So, one solution is to buy both the third and the second editions, and while you are at it get your hands on his "Sparks of innovation" which is most interesting despite its old age. The sections on touchscreens are incomparable, to give but one example. Another solution is to get Shneiderman to write a real big fat book on HCI! There are enough textbooks or collected readings available for all the courses. There are also so many web design books around that sometimes I want to scream ENOUGH! What is missing is a recent reference book and an introductory text. I wish Shneiderman would delay the fourth edition for a few more years and get a _real_ HCI introduction and reference out. In the meantime, this third edition is the next best thing, but it has to be coupled with "Sparks of innovation", Don Norman's books, Jakob Nielsen's books, and a dash of Tognazzini, Tufte, and Tex Avery.
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