Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer

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Summary: Windows and web design basics for developers
Review: Following up on his excellent "Coder to Developer" Mike Gunderloy takes us on the next step in the journey. Having given us a complete set of technical skills Mike now gives us common sense and practical design skills for Windows. With the full complement of skills in hand you will be able to complete the entire technical side of the application development cycle.

The design fundamentals presented in this book are pretty basic and common sense. Just having use the Microsoft Office suite on Windows will have taught you many of these things. But what you will find is that the book not only gives you the 'how' of interface design, but also the 'why'.

I've been on a number of projects where someone has spent the time to define what controls should be used in what context. When dialogs should be used. How menus should be organized. And so on. You should evaluate the book in this context as well.

An excellent companion to "Coder to Developer". I wonder what will come next. Developer to Architect perhaps?

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Summary: Lacking Good Technical Content
Review: Just finished reading the book and I must say that this book is lacking good technical content. It focused more on trivial things and explained them too in-depthly. Plus, it seems that windows based design was the focus and web based design was brought in as an afterthought. It doesn't nearly have as much content or good design recommendations. Also, don't even get me started on the introduction of "Avalon" into the book. This chapter was completely out of place in this book. The lackluster chapter described something thats a year or more off, not to mention stuff that is going to change. Not anywhere in this chapter did it explain good design patterns for Avalon, as currently there are none. This chapter seemed more of an "intro to avalon" chapter - which is why I thought it was out of place.

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Summary: Most Developers are not great Designers
Review: The fact is, most developers are not great User Interface (UI) designers. I look at user interfaces designed by most developers and I cringe. Even my own user interfaces are, frankly, not that great, and I have been at this for a long time (most often doing server-side development - in part because of my lacking design skills). After reading this book, I think I have at least some hope of doing a better job, because it made me think about things that I do not often think about. The reality is that even the best developer will generally not be working on a team that has a separate user interface design team, and so anything that can get a developer at least thinking about issues involving user interfaces is a good thing.