The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems vs The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R)
When comparing The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems vs The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R), the Slant community recommends The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) for most people. In the question“What are the most influential books every programmer should read?” The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) is ranked 15th while The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose The C Programming Language (AKA: K&R) is:
This book is so well known that it's affectionately called "K & R", after the authors. It's been cited in many other books and is familiar to most, if not all, CS students.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Looks at the psychology behind interaction design
The author takes an in depth look at "cognitive engineering" and applying it to software design (ex. How users form habits when interacting with software).
Pro Well known classic
This book is so well known that it's affectionately called "K & R", after the authors.
It's been cited in many other books and is familiar to most, if not all, CS students.
Pro It's excerpted from the idea of its creators
This book is written by Dennis Ritchie, who was one of the main people behind the development and design of C and UNIX.
Pro Creative, challenging exercises
The challenges at the end of each chapter do a great job of requiring many of the skills learned up to that point. Completing the challenges is a great way of insuring you understand the material.
Pro This book set the template for programming language books
Cons
Con The point is not often clear
The Human Interface can be a confusing read for a variety of reasons.
The author is frequently referencing one of his projects, Canon Cat, even when there is no beneficial/relevant reason to do so.
There are some contradictions throughout the book, and plenty of negativity towards the studies he mentions (however, he does not often use studies to back up his own claims).
The book does not have illustrations or screenshots, making it difficult to follow at times.
Con Out of Date
Some commands and practices are out of date, so errata and googling is needed while going through the book.
Con Teaches bad style
The K&R style works for old Unix mainframe command-line programs that exit after a simple task and leave the cleanup to the OS; where input is only from trusted experts; and most functions are only called internally to the program. The environment is very different today. This style will get your server owned by hackers, or crash it due to a memory leak, etc. You will have to unlearn what you've learned from this book to use C correctly in the real world today.
Con Not for beginners
Assumes familiarity not only with programming concepts but some C language specifics.