Reddit reviews Interaction Design: Beyond Human - Computer Interaction
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The book is $53.74 on amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470665769 The painting is $395 http://fineartamerica.com/featured/thoughts-in-passage-ii-michael-john-march.html
> What does being a UX specialist entail?
It can vary quite a bit. Most of my time in UX was spent as a usability consultant. I worked with external clients (anywhere from mobile tech and eCommerce to health care and b2b interaction) to design, conduct, and report the findings of usability studies to improve their products (or address whatever need they had). This can involve a lot of different research methods including eye tracking, surveys, contextual inquiry, etc., but most commonly involved "user studies" where you bring in their target audience to use the product and provide feedback. Using a combination of performance metrics, subjective feedback, and other information gathered, we reported back to the client and usually included some re-design suggestions.
There are three major areas of UX: computer science, psychology/cognitive science, and design. Depending on your emphasis in these fields, a UX job can vary greatly from doing mostly Information Architecture (IA) and graphical design to software engineering with a concentration on UX principles and how they fit into development (such as through Behavior Driven Design).
> Any good reading recommendations on good UX practices?
UX learns a lot from Human Factors & Ergonomics (a field within Psychology) and a must read for anyone interested in HF&E (and/or usability) is Donald Norman's "Psychology of Everyday Things" They also re-released the book titled "Design of Everyday Things." It's informative, fun, and easy to read.
For an introduction to UX methods, I suggest Rogers/Sharp/Preece's "Interaction Design. There are other books that will go into more depth, but those two will give you a strong foundation.
I had an intro course in interaction design at my college, and we used This Book
Not sure if that is helpful or not.
As for programming, as far as I learned in my introduction course, rapid prototyping is much more important than deep programming knowledge.
The ability to make a quick mock-up seems to be what you are looking for, so something web-based, that'll allow you to edit templates on a code level may be useful