Review by Erika Orrick:
A must-have for anyone considering grad school. This book takes you from why do you want to go, to do you have what it takes, to finding an advisor, to writing your dissertation. It gives you guidelines on how to deal with picking an advisor, dealing with stress, there's even a discussion on grad school and married life. Since the climate of graduate school is one without explicit guidelines in a sink-or-swim environment, this guide can be essential to fill in the holes.
Review by Lynellen D. S. Perry:
This is an EXCELLENT reference manual for anyone writing a senior project, a master's thesis, or a doctoral dissertation. The book is easy to read and offers step-by-step advice on how to pick a research topic, how to write your proposal, introduction, methods section, results, and discussion. Examples are included for each phase and the author even gives advice on what NOT to write, and how to avoid common mistakes. This is indispensable.
Review by Erika Orrick:
If you want a good textbook overview of HCI, this is one of the books you ought to read. The authors, all respected leaders in the HCI community, explore some fundamentals before diving into more complex issues. I especially like the format of the first three chapters where they first discuss the human by himself, then the computer by itself, and finally in chapter three they begin to explain the complexities of the interaction between the two. Yes, this is a text book, but don't let that deter you. It reads well and is a good reference book for any computer scientist to have on his or her shelf, not just HCI practitioners.
Review by Erika Orrick:
The Design of Everyday Things (originally published in hardcover as The Psychology of Everyday Things) refutes people's age-old response of "it must be my fault" that something won't work. In this book, Don Norman, long recognized as a leader in Human Factors research, discusses how designers fail to take users into account when designing the simplest things, such as telephones and doors. The Design of Everyday Things is an easy read, very hard to put down. You'll laugh at some of the examples he gives, but you'll recognize yourself in many of them, too.
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