Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design is a useful and approachable book. Filling out a form is no fun at all, but the guidance in this book can help you make your form as painless as possible. Whether you design web forms every day or you just have a form on your website that you don’t know how to improve, this book will be a great read.

The pitfall of listing best practices for design is that context matters. There are design choices that are right in some circumstances and wrong in others. Take, for example, the decision of how to break up a form over multiple pages, if at all. This book does a good job of explaining the benefits and drawbacks of different design decisions rather than running through a checklist of prescriptions.

Web Form Design is also full of real world examples. It’s well organized, with the exception that it is hard to tell what chapter you are in if you open up the book to a random page or start flipping through it. The writing is clear and accessible. This is a good book to pass around the office because it not only gives design guidance, but also makes a case for why forms ought to be better.

This one definitely has a place on the Pure Visibility bookshelf.