Soft - sucks! And what to do with it?

Soft - sucks! And what to do with it?
Posted by: David Platt
Paperback, 248 pages
This book is on ozon.ru / books.ru

To be honest, at first I did not expect anything interesting from this book: first, the name suggests that nothing except grumbling, grumbling and reasoning in the book will be, and secondly, this idea was supported by not too flattering reviews. But the first opinion is not always true, and so it happened this time.

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It is worth saying that, despite the title, the book itself does not consist of silly and unsubstantiated statements in the style of “how these stupid programs got me”. Moreover, the author himself notes that your negative feedback to any program should be primarily specific and fair, and not consist of negative and attacks towards the developers. The main idea that Platt wants to convey to the reader (assuming that the reader is a regular user) is that users can and should influence the quality of the software they use. I don’t like how some function is implemented - write about it to the developers and tell me how to do it better. Annoying this terrible multi-level menu? Write about it and suggest how to make it more convenient.

Although the book is addressed to users, it will be equally useful for developers to read it. And maybe even more useful. After all, we, communicating with the computer "on you", have become accustomed to all these computer things, strange questions, error messages and windows that require confirmation of actions. All this seems so natural that by creating our own program, we do not hesitate to copy these elements, which the unprepared user simply puts into a stupor.

Of course, this book can be reduced to one well-known abbreviation KISS, but then we risk losing a lot of interesting details. David Platt tells why programs ask us a lot of questions and why they couldn’t do it, why some sites are not so friendly and how people differ from geeks (or rather, geeks from people =))

In general, in spite of the somewhat specific style of presentation and the ostentatious humor of the author (which personally prevented me from reading the book at first), this book can be called worthy of reading. Of course, here you can’t find sensible recipes or tips, and the whole book is more like a great essay by the author on a given topic, but I don’t find such books to be quite useless. On the contrary, they reflect the opinion of any person, to know which is certainly useful even if it does not coincide with yours. More precisely - especially if it does not coincide with yours =)