João Prado Maia’s Weblog

I have been going through this book for the past few weeks, and so far it’s the best book around for developers beginning with Objective-C and the iPhone SDK. The writing is natural (and that’s hard to find these days), detailed and sometimes funny in a quirky way. I appreciate the fact that they use lots of screenshots to explain the interactions with Interface Builder and Xcode.

They have Chapter 3 (Handling Basic Interaction) available for free online if you would like to read a sample of the book. Highly recommended.

You may also like to follow Jeff LaMarche’s blog, one of the co-authors of this book.

We purchased a copy of this book a few months ago when it was still being written, so we got some “beta” copies of it in PDF format. It’s a very good book, with way more detail than what you can find in the Prototype documentation site.

Highly recommended.

I was browsing through a local Barnes & Noble tonight and found a great book on web design: Web Design Index 7.

At first I thought it was some book for web design beginners, but I couldn’t be more wrong. It’s a wonderful book full of screenshots of some very cool web site designs. It seems like a perfect book to inspire your work when designing a completely new site or application.

The publisher, The Pepin Press, has more editions of this book, and I’m sure I’ll buy some more after I go through this one.

I wish there was a good book on general guidelines for data analytics. Stuff like best practices on how to display historic data, best ways to plot graphs displaying that information, etc.

The book Visualizing Data seems interesting, but it’s too bad that it is a book about Processing, a very specific type of data analysis software.

Show Me the Numbers is another very good book on this topic, and much more general in teaching some of these concepts. Sometimes I felt it was a bit too academic.

Information Dashboard Design is another good book, but it shows off so many examples of bad design when building dashboard modules, that it forgets to also give a few examples of good design.

While I’m on a roll here with praise for Firebug and YSlow, I have to point out a great book on performance tuning for web applications or web sites: High Performance Web Sites, by Steve Souders.

This is one of the best books I have ever read on performance work for web applications, especially because of all of the research that Steve did while working as Chief Performance Engineer at Yahoo! He has since moved on to Google to continue his performance research there.

YSlow is a Firefox extension that is integrated with Firebug that analyzes your web pages and recommends improvements. This book discusses the 14 rules for great performance that are used by YSlow.