Reddit reviews Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web & Mobile Application Design (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

>Guide to Lean Startup Method

Another vote for Eric Ries' book, absolutely my favourite startup book.

Along those same lines (though not specifically startup targetted) I highly recommend Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. and Dan Ariely's irrational books. Both are excellent guides to the underlying psychology of design and marketing, an understanding of which is crucial through the iterative process.

I enjoyed Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web & Mobile Application Design quite a bit.

If your friend has never programmed before, they should learn some programming basics before attempting to take on making applications. Assuming they do know basic programming, I'm unsure as to exactly what you want.

Honestly, most of the good advice for application development is split between design books and coding books. I've never really heard of a good (extensive) resource that covers both.

My personal favorite book on design/usability for web applications is Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. It's actually a textbook for a web application design course at my university.

My favorite book to learn mobile coding was "Pro Android" (and was in fact the book I learned android development from), which is now on its third edition

I'm not an iOS developer/designer so I don't have any good resources there.

No problem!

If you're serious about developing a web application, there's a book I really dig about the "high-level" thinking that goes into building something that people are going to use: Designing the Obvious: A Common-Sense Approach to Web & Mobile Application Design

There's no code in it - mostly, it just talks about the general ways that a web app can hinder users, and the common patterns that already exist to solve those problems.

I frequently buy this book (among others) for my clients, and I often read books about their industry that they recommend to me.

The hugest - and least-quantifiable - cost in a software project of any kind is in the communication portion:

• Sending a dozen emails trying to hash out how some component ought to look
  
  
• Your developer thinks they get what you want, but they misunderstood a key component (or you forgot to mention it!) and spent hours going in the wrong direction
  
  
• You think you're describing one thing but, since you and the developer are speaking your own version of "industry language", you've described something completely different to the graphic designer and the developer, and now they're working in different directions
  
  
• You thought the developer would plan out such-and-such, and the developer thought that was coming from you
  
  
• Etc., etc.
  
  The more you can do ahead of time to bridge the gap between you and your developer (or team), the less you'll pay overall, and the better the product you'll get.
  
  Anything you can define ahead of time will help you to get a more accurate estimate: a written specification, examples cribbed from other apps... I even had a client who had made a crude prototype in Powerpoint, and it was actually incredibly helpful as a reference when we were banging out the details; it probably saved him 15 hours of my billable hours throughout the project.