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Comment by brendoncrawford | Hacker News Reader

Great books, but why is it necessary that every hacker should read them?

How are these relevant to the hacker who writes his own Linux device drivers? Or the hacker building an open source voice recognition library?

There are plenty of hackers who do amazing work that has nothing to do with visual design.

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I wish even the "deep" hackers would read these books and realise that command line interfaces and C prototypes are human interfaces too. Yet every time something explodes because someone confused -r and -R on the shell or something equally ridiculous, the internet echo is largely "LOL if you cannot read manpages, then why are you even using computers".

I liked the nuclear reactor example in The Design of Everyday Things because it illustrated (again) that usability is important even if only trained professionals have to use <something>.

They don't cover just visual design, but design in general. While visual interfaces are most commonly associated with design, design is actually related to many other areas as well.

Exactly like discoverability of APIs, or the documentation of a library.

Latin is related to many things, but surely we can agree it's not a "must learn" for someone designing a device driver.

Something as general as "don't make me think" may make sense for API design, but honestly I doubt the applicability of "The Elements of Typographic Style" or "Grid Systems" to library documentation and API discoverability.

Perhaps you are taking the headline a little to seriously, literally. How about.

"Design Books Every Hacker Who Would Like to Read About Design Should Consider Reading Unless They are Designing an API"

Because the author of the post probably has a very narrow vision of what the term "hacker" means. And putting "every" and "should" in the same sentence makes it sound like it's some kind of universal advice worth gold or something.

I know 2 of the books mentioned and they are great books, but the poster should mention that the Design of Everyday Things is starting to be seriously dated. At least for the examples exposed - the principles do not age.

hey ekianjo. you're absolutely right in that 'design of everyday things'is an old book. It also has some examples that will probably never age. Out of the 5 books in the list, it has been the most useful of any design book (to me). Changed how I think about design.

I consider the design of everyday things a good book but I am not sure I would consider it a "must-have". I bought it because someone mentioned it on HN before in the same way ("Must-read") and while I found it insightful, most of the principles were not new to me and I found it poorly written (it could have been MUCH shorter and concise). Some pages are really fillers. That's also why I question its "universal" status, as it is far from being perfect (especially in the later chapters).

Have you read them?

I've read 2 of them and they have may be relevant. The ideas in them go past visual design and through to communication of ideas etc.

Life is short, but certainly not so short that you don't have time for a few good books that aren't directly related to what you do.

In which case, maybe the title should have been "Design Books Everybody Should Read"?

At the very least for the stimulation, I should suppose.

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