By Jenifer Tidwell
352 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Interfaces-Patterns-Effective-Interaction/dp/0596008031

This book is a pretty good overview of UI design.  The concepts could be applied to interactions with pretty much anything, but Tidwell does focus most of the time on desktop and web applications, as well as some mobile device interfaces.  The book defines around 80 different patterns that can be used to solve common design issues.  As the author points out, "This book isn't Design 101; it's more like Design 225.  ... It's expected that you already know the basics of UI design."  But as you might expect, a lot of the material is stuff you already know inherently, but there were enough concepts that were either new or were things that I understood at least at a subconscious level, but were worthwhile to formally define.

One thing that was surprising was that there was some overlap in the information from this book and another book I read recently entitled "Information Dashboard Design."  Both pointed out the human ability to process some visual features "preattentively."  This simply means there are some things our brains can derive meaning from before the viewer pays conscious attention.  If you make use of those aspects "your visual system does the hard work for you, and it seems to work in a massively parallel fashion."

There were also several concepts related to information architecture, which is closely related to a UI's design.  One especially helpful section was an extensive list of controls that typically work best to represent a particular type of data.  I plan on writing another blog post around this topic in the near future.