What you will learn:

A plenty of guidelines that will help you improve the usability and accessibility of your website. Most of the book is about usability though.

Prerequisites:

Nothing besides being familiar with the web.

Target Audience:

People who own, manage, design or develop web sites. If you have a good background in usability, then you might not find anything new here.

Clarity:

The guidelines are very simple. Most guidelines come with an example (graphical, mostly) to make things even clearer.

The Good:

• Simple, straight to the point presentation with colorful examples.

• Accompanying every guidelines are two ratings for its relative importance and strength of evidence .
• A plenty of guide lines backed up by research results, not just personal opinions.
• Could be used as a reference when designing/reviewing interfaces. You can find the guidelines ordered by strength of evidence and relative importance in the book’s appendices.
• A free version of the book is available (legally) for download at the book’s web site.

The Bad:

• Some guidelines are just too obvious (like recommending that we use at least two radio buttons in web forms).
• Not as much research results and statistics as I’ve hoped for.

Bottom line:

This isn’t really worth purchasing. If you’re new to usability, check Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Otherwise just download the PDFs to quickly skim through the guidelines and note whatever you might find interesting.