Recommendations

A few weeks ago I asked people a question on Twitter:

I got many interesting responses, but one of them asked if I had any recommendations for books on compilers.

Oh gosh. Books? Books about computer science? I’m actually not very well-read: while I’ve been programming since I was a kid, I “only” have an undergraduate formal education. That means the set of books I’ve read about CS is rather haphazard. But I suppose I do have a few things that come to mind.

Priorities

From Effective UI:

The point of software isn’t necessarily to engross your users in the experience of using the software, it is to keep them focused on the ultimate goals they’re trying to accomplish in using the software, rather than on the actual use of the software itself. […] To be truly and unobtrusively useful, software must clear the straightest, most frictionless path to the accomplishment of the user’s goals.

Effective UI is a very good book, one of the few instances where a discussion of UI (or UX, “user experience”) doesn’t drive me up a wall. This is…