I am sometimes asked which books I would recommend reading. For the blog, this is generally not difficult — it’s enough to open all posts with the tag “I-recommend.” But since it’s been almost five years now since I revived my blog and began writing about the books I’ve read, I decided to put together a selection of non-fiction books I’ve read during this time that fall into the category of “you must read them.”
I have already written detailed reviews of all these books, so this time I’ve selected only the very best, grouped them by topic. For each book I give only brief recommendations on why they are worth reading, but you can always open the link to the full review. I hope this will be useful to someone. So, let’s begin.
Working with numbers, analytics—all of it always ends the same way: with graphical representation to clearly present data to ordinary people, management, shareholders, or even to understand it yourself. Many authors focus on the skill of presenting information in this form, although it’s often just a single chapter in books on broader topics. Even from those mentioned in my blog, you can refer to “The Numbers Game“ by Vasiliy Sabirov or “How to Lie with Statistics“ by Darrell Huff.
Following a recommendation from Vasiliy Sabirov, I read a book entirely dedicated to the correct way to convey any information through charts—“Charts That Persuade Everyone” by Alexander Bogachev. As a manager, I encounter charts frequently, but even I hadn’t considered some of the finer details that can drastically change how information is perceived.
This is a very short book—240 pages, nearly half of which are examples of various charts. But this is precisely its value: there’s almost no filler here; everything is strictly focused on the topic.
The discovery of the past few months for me is the book This Button Needs Text by Kiril Egerev. It likely would have gone unnoticed if Alexey Arefyev hadn’t recommended it in his Telegram channel about product management.
Kiril Egerev is a seasoned copywriter who has worked in many online publications, both as an author and as an editor. Recently, he has been working as a UX writer at Russia’s Sberbank. For those unfamiliar with professional terminology, let me clarify: a “copywriter” is someone who professionally writes various types of non-fictional texts. These can include advertising copy, descriptions, official letters, and so on. UX stands for “User eXperience,” which essentially refers to how users interact with your product and what emotions they experience during this interaction. A UX writer (or UX copywriter) is a specialist focused on creating product texts. Here’s a direct quote from the book:
“UX writers are typically the ones who write clear and non-annoying texts for error messages, buttons, switches, and all other interface elements. They help develop the product’s voice, compile style guides, ensure consistency and adherence to typography requirements, and often handle user emails as well.”
In his book, Kiril aims to explain “briefly and clearly” what his work entails and why it is essential for any product, countering the common misconception of “who cares what we call the buttons; everyone will understand anyway.” In IT, there is also a role known as UX specialist (often called a “UXer”). In practice, the line between a UX specialist and a UX writer is very blurred. It’s generally accepted that the former focuses more on the overall interface and interaction (proper arrangement of elements, creating an intuitive design), while the latter specifically handles interface texts. However, in reality, one doesn’t exist without the other. As a result, the tasks often fall to either a team of two specialists with narrower roles or a single person who does it all.
The description promised a lot of useful information about fonts for those who know little about the subject. The topic is generally very interesting to me, and the book is colorful—so I bought into. However, it turns out that the book is practically about nothing. It’s not even a book, but rather a collection of loosely connected thoughts, heavily sprinkled with images and tons of font names and highly professional terminology. After a while, you start to realize you no longer understand what’s being described. Even the design of the book, in my opinion as a reader, was quite inconvenient, despite the author constantly emphasizing the importance of choosing fonts and design for readability. Ironically, the book itself doesn’t excel in this regard. But the main problem for me is that it’s unclear who the book is for and what goal the author was trying to achieve. Simply put, the book feels like it’s about nothing. I don’t understand where all the praise is coming from.
