Exploring C or Contextual Design

Exploring C++: The Programmer

Author: Ray Lischner

Exploring C++ uses a series of self-directed lessons to divide C++ into bite-sized chunks that you can digest as rapidly as you can swallow them. The book assumes only a basic understanding of fundamental programming concepts (variables, functions, expressions, statements) and requires no prior knowledge of C or any other particular language. It reduces the usually considerable complexity of C++.

The included lessons allow you to learn by doing, as a participant of an interactive education session. You'll master each step in a one sitting before you proceed to the next. Author Ray Lischner has designed questions to promote learning new material. And by responding to questions throughout the text, you'll be engaged every step of the way.

Book about: New Perspectives on Microsoft Office Access 2003 Comprehensive Second Edi or Excel

Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems

Author: Hugh Beyer

This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations.

Contextual Design enables you to:
* gather detailed data about how people work and use systems
* develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population
* generate system designs from a knowledge of customer work
* diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies, redundancies, and omissions

"The foremost experts on contextual inquiry have packed what they know into a book of substance and intelligence. It lucidly shows how to capture the real requirements of customers adn fit designs to their needs. If you care about your customers and want to understand what they need, then you need this book."
--Larry Constantine, Principal Consultant, Constantine & Locwood, Ltd., Professor of Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney (Australia), Author of Constantine on Peopleware and Software for User

"This book conveys the understanding and wisdom that they [the authors] have gained from their experience in contextual design in a form that is accessible to students and design practitioners. It will serve as a guide and handbook for the next generation of interaction designers, and as a result we can expect the usability and appropriateness of computer systems to be greatlyimproved."
--Terry Winograd, Stanford University

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
Ch. 1	Introduction	1
Ch. 2	Gathering Customer Data	29
Ch. 3	Principles of Contextual Inquiry	41
Ch. 4	Contextual Inquiry in Practice	67
Ch. 5	A Language of Work	81
Ch. 6	Work Models	89
Ch. 7	The Interpretation Session	125
Ch. 8	Consolidation	139
Ch. 9	Creating One View of the Customer	151
Ch. 10	Communicating to the Organization	199
Ch. 11	Work Redesign	215
Ch. 12	Using Data to Drive Design	229
Ch. 13	Design from Data	273
Ch. 14	System Design	295
Ch. 15	The User Environment Design	317
Ch. 16	Project Planning and Strategy	347
Ch. 17	Prototyping as a Design Tool	367
Ch. 18	From Structure to User Interface	379
Ch. 19	Iterating with a Prototype	393
Ch. 20	Putting It into Practice	415
	Afterword	439
	Readings and Resources	443
	References	449
	Index	459
	About the Authors	471