I'll second this recommendation. I picked up the 4th edition a few months ago.

It's a great book, but also a very long read. As a developer who is interested in developing usable apps, but not in being a full-time UX designer, I've found that I've been able to pick and choose the bits of the book that are relevant to the tasks I'm working on. It helps if you've read the introductory bits, but later on it has sections about web, desktop, mobile, etc. that are useful on their own. It's almost like having several books in one.

I had bought and read the 1st edition of About Face years ago. Thought it good generally. Might not have understood everything in it at the time. I remember him talking about "affordances". One point I thought was good, was his idea for a scroll bar with both the arrow heads at the same end of the bar, instead of at opposite ends. This saves you from having to move your mouse from one end of the bar to the other, to reverse scroll direction (since you have to click on either the up/left or down/right heads).

Like this (for a horizontal scroll bar):

<||> =============================

instead of this:

<|==============================|>

Cool. Later I heard from someone that some OS/GUI platform actually has his improved version - I forget which.