Recommended Reading

• Cooper, Alan. About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., 1995.

  Chapter 11, "Orchestration and Flow," has an interesting discussion of how programmers confuse possibility with probability, and as a result ask the user questions (usually through unnecessary dialog boxes) even when it is almost certain what the answer will be. Chapter 13, "Overhead and Idiocy," discusses how to recognize and eliminate many unnecessary tasks. Chapter 14, "The Secret Weapon of Interface Design," includes a good discussion about how to eliminate unnecessary user input by remembering previous input.

• DiLascia, Paul. "C/C++ Q & A." Microsoft Systems Journal, March 1996.

  Describes why the GetWindowPlacement and SetWindowPlacement API functions are necessary for saving and restoring window sizes and locations. Presents a C++ class to read and write this information to the registry.