The doctoral thesis creating user interfaces by demonstration submitted by the author of this book in May 1987 to the University of Toronto was a break through in visual, example-based user interface design. Peridot, the name given to this user interface design and management system, allows the designer to demonstrate what the user interface should look like and how the end user will interact with it. The book is a complete reprint of the thesis.
Chapter 1 and 2 give an introduction to the topic and discuss relations to similar research work. For a short study of the capabilities of Peridot, chapter 3 lets the reader participate in a design session for a pop-up menu. The remaining chapters 4 through 15 give an in-depth presentation of the technical details how the Peridot system works, how it may be used to design interfaces with a scope similar and about as powerful as the well known Macintosh windowing system, including graphics, icon construction etc., how user manipulation of a mouse is a anticipated during design by demonstration in a protopyed, sample interface, how design decisions are inferred and how replicated design items are handled, how application-oriented procedures are linked to an interface created by Peridot and so forth, concluding in ideas for future work and of a critical review what had been achieved.
The book is well written and well illustrated. My only criticism is the poor quality of some of the screen copies taken in design sessions and during system usage; reading the text and detecting figures in the design area is almost impossible in the book (worser than in my copy of the thesis which is a back copy of a Toronto University report).