web programming

With the second edition, Morville and Rosenfeld have met a pretty significant challenge: surpassing their first book. The new edition is chock full of great new chapters on topics both technical and creative.

By covering subjects like thesauri, CVs, and metadata, while at the same time tackling headfirst "big picture" ideas of information architecture, the two authors are to be commended for writing a book that is at once instructive to advanced practioners yet still recommendable to strategists, designers, programmers, and others who might have only a vague notion of information architecture. And the chapter on business strategy is as good an introduction as I've read in any business book.

This book is the closest anyone has come to a single book addressing all of the complexity and challenges of organizing, structuring, and managing large scale Web sites, and does so with clear, easy-to-read prose eshewing jargon and consultant-speak. Quite an accomplishment, indeed!

The title of this book is a bit misleading, I thought it should be the caption at the top of the front cover, "Designing Large Scale Web Sites." While the authors do a good job at covering a large amount of material, I was disappointed that most of the material was a cross between design information and usability. A lot of the information is available in other places, but if you haven't done much reading on various design or usability aspects, this book does a good job of bringing together basic information from a number of different disciplines into one place.
The organization of the material was well thought out, topics were divided into logical sections, and built upon previous chapters when appropriate.
If you haven't done any work on a large scale project before, or aren't familiar with usability, or have some areas that you need to know more about, this is an excellent book to look at. Otherwise, you may find a large portion of this book covering familiar territory, and that much of what is talked about is already company policy or common sense.

This is a classic book to have on the importance of planning, and the art of researching towards easier implementation. It gives excellent review on the various tasks a large-scale project should work through.
This book is mostly targetted for IA wanna-be. Web developers and project managers will benefit only from 7-8 chapters.

I think the authors had focused too much on why IA is important, rather then how to implement it correctly. A large percentage of the ink was wasted on what is IA and how you should sell it. I would love to see another case study or two.

All in all, this is a nice book to have. The chapters I liked most was on the labels, grouping, controlled vocabularies and case studies.