Rating: 
Summary: First-Rate Introduction to Principles of Interface Design
Review: This is not a list of rules; it's a look at the underlying principles of interface design. Mullet and Sano take a point-by-point tour of the basic principles of visual design, bringing in good examples from a wide range of real-world products. Their examples range from computer interfaces to street signs. The authors do a fantastic job of illustrating these basic ideas; even the layout of the book is its own example. By itself, this book won't give you the recipe to program a good UI, but it will give you a starting point from which to build *great* UIs. Everyone involved in programming and designing software should read this book several times.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: This is one of the best books around on GUI design. While it is from Sun's publishing arm, it isn't oriented toward a particular OS. It's a good complimentary book to Alan Cooper's "About Face" since it covers pragmatic graphic design issues where Cooper's book is devoted to more theoretical issues. I particularly recommend it for developers doing RAD in Visual Basic and Delphi since it's so easy to do a truly bad UI in these languages.
Rating:
Summary: If you design graphical UIs, you need this book
Review: This is the best book I've ever seen on how to design the graphical part of graphical user interfaces. I knew there was a whole world of knowledge out there in the graphic design community that could be applied to interface design, but that was inacessible to me until I read this book. This is NOT an introductory book on interface design. If you haven't had coursework or other design experience yet, you should pick up a more comprehensive and introductory book first.
Rating: 
Summary: Pros and cons
Review: True, this is one of the best Design and Visual Interface books available. However, at times, the "Sun Micro and Apple Mac" bias became repetitive and old. It's not that I don't agree that Mac has always had the best interface and that MS Windows is an inferior take-off, it's that the authors failed to comprehensively address the 3.x Windows interface, pro or con. Maybe that was not their goal. Or, perhaps they just need to write a second edition. Also noted is that the authors state, at the end of the book, that Chapter 4 is most critical to the reader, yet the Table of Contents doesn't even have chapter numbers. Oh well, perhaps a minor flaw in a very good book that itself, is visual to the eye and even nice to the touch.
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