I just read a book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. The tagline of the book is – A common sense approach to web usability.
The book is very interesting and the author has pointed out how web-designers/developers often overlook certain simple yet important web-usage patterns while designing a web page.
The author has discussed several usability traits that we need to keep in mind while designing web pages; like users mostly don’t read pages, they just scan/skim them.
Steve has also provided the Acid-test for good site design:
1) What site is this? [Site Id]
2) What page I am on? [Page name]
3) What are the major sections of this site? [Sections]
4) What are my options at this level? [Local navigation]
5) Where am I in the scheme of things? [‘You are here’ indicators]
6) How can I search?
If the page is well designed, you should be able to answer these questions without hesitation.
The book is merely a 3 hr read and you can just browse through it. Its full of illustrations and examples so it wont bore.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Wanna learn Java / J2EE
A friend has pointed a very good site for learning Java development (from scratch or just another level).
Its fully loaded and even a high-school student can learn Java by using the tutorials on this site.
My first take was that the official Sun Java Tutorial is the best resource for learning the language. But, when I just skimmed thru the contents, within minutes I was convinced that this one is damn good and better than the official tutorial.
The site is http://www.javapassion.com/
It covers a wide spectrum of Java Technologies – from Core Java to Struts ; from Advanced Java programming to Java Server Faces and web-services.
The training guide uses NetBeans IDE which I don’t prefer much. However, once you get some hands-on exercises on NetBeans, you can switch over to Eclipse IDE (look out for Jboss Eclipse IDE for web-development)
One more site that I would like to mention here is http://www.java2s.com/. This site contains a lot of useful and reusable code snippets not only for java, but also for many other programming languages and even sql queries.
At present in the industry, a standard requisite for someone who wants to call himself/herself a Java developer is to know J2EE along with some frameworks like
Struts Spring Hibernate (for database access)
Its fully loaded and even a high-school student can learn Java by using the tutorials on this site.
My first take was that the official Sun Java Tutorial is the best resource for learning the language. But, when I just skimmed thru the contents, within minutes I was convinced that this one is damn good and better than the official tutorial.
The site is http://www.javapassion.com/
It covers a wide spectrum of Java Technologies – from Core Java to Struts ; from Advanced Java programming to Java Server Faces and web-services.
The training guide uses NetBeans IDE which I don’t prefer much. However, once you get some hands-on exercises on NetBeans, you can switch over to Eclipse IDE (look out for Jboss Eclipse IDE for web-development)
One more site that I would like to mention here is http://www.java2s.com/. This site contains a lot of useful and reusable code snippets not only for java, but also for many other programming languages and even sql queries.
At present in the industry, a standard requisite for someone who wants to call himself/herself a Java developer is to know J2EE along with some frameworks like
Struts Spring Hibernate (for database access)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
