The book understands it's goals and has a clear purpose. How to get people to understand, and accomplish their goals on the site. As suggested by the name, the book is to the point and doesn't waste time.
The writing style of this book can make it difficult to read. Long walls of text, references to terms that are never defined, and a lack of captions.
There is a lack of visual examples, and the small font makes it easy for a reader to lose their place.
Throughout the book, typographic practices are explained along with their historical significance. Many terms and practices in typography are steeped in history, and learning it helps understand both the rationale, and significance of their adoption, and as a result, what role they play in modern typography.
Whatever that's being designed, for whatever purpose, it always has the same goal of being used by someone. This book is focused on that interaction and on why users make mistakes. These principles still apply directly to web design, when design leads users to make mistakes, it will ultimately drive users away.
This book isn't focused on recent trends or properties specific to a certain field, and thus applies to all design. It provides a broad view and allows focusing on the fundamental goals of the user experience, rather than being limited in scope.
This book challenges the reader to think about the design of all objects, and their user-friendliness/usability. It is not specifically targeted towards web designers, but will help web designers think in a way that benefits users.
This book is most beneficial for beginners just starting out with web design and UX as it's not a resource with much depth. Someone with an understanding of design essentials may find this book fairly repetitive and common sense.
Many of the theories presented in the book will already be familiar to designers. However this book backs up the theories with data, additional research and examples that encourage the designer to consider the theories in different ways.
Each theory has two pages; one page with visual examples, and another page with a written description. These act more as an introduction to the various theories as they don't go into much depth.
This book focuses on Dieter Rams and his career. Many of his designs are demonstrated throughout the book. However, the book does not specifically focus on teaching design philosophy, but more on the person who created the important design rules and considerations that we use today.
Rather than providing proper context, and author frequently tries to tie points together by using backwards and forwards references ("As you've seen in chapter ___,").
Though there is a lot of interesting points throughout the book, nothing ties together so it can be hard to make sense of.
The author goes into detail about things that would have been far better explained using practical examples.
For example, a rant on why Comic Sans is bad but no discussion on font selection for the context.
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