rcmnd

Rocket Surgery Made EasyBook

by Steve Krug

Who uses, recommends or left Rocket Surgery Made Easy, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

2 people

Jason Evanish
Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company; former product lead at KISSmetrics who writes about leadership and product management.
likedaffiliate link

If you want to learn the basics of usability testing to improve your app or site without breaking the bank, this is the book to get. It's a quick read completely focused on getting you to actually do your own testing.

His continuously-updated books page, where every book he reads gets a 1-10 rating and a "Why Read it" note; the book links carry his Amazon affiliate tag. The page carries no publication date for individual entries — its own metadata gives article:published_time 2012-12-16 and article:modified_time 2020-10-28, and books were added across that whole span. (undated page)

2020-10-28·jasonevanish.com ↗

Joel Spolsky
Software developer; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Fog Creek Software, and author of the Joel on Software blog.
recommended

The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple "hallway" usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended.

A short post flagging Steve Krug's new usability book.

2010-01-25·joelonsoftware.com ↗

What they also use

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.