The Microsoft-Centric Way Alan Cooper has a legendary status among Windows programmers. Rather than sit in his gazebo and clip coupons from his Microsoft stock, however, Cooper has chosen to put his fame as a user interface guru on the line in About Face .
Cooper has a lot of valuable things to say about program design and behavior.
I particularly enjoyed his railings against the many idiotic applications which provide unbounded controls for user input, and then immediately turn around and slap the user's wrist for entering an illegal value. This is a landmark book. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets. This old joke seems particularly relevant with respect to standards. Nothing is more paradoxical in the software industry than standards.