Books + HCI

I've been looking at more local bay area companies, trying to find ones that look like a place I would want to work after I graduate. Found a few, and emailed them asking what they look for in a job applicant. The responses I got were interesting. A lot of the User Interface companies said they like well rounded artistic abilities over technical ones, however skills in Flash, CSS, HTML, and Javascript were major pluses. I guess a huge part of Interface Design is done with websites, however the really interesting stuff (to me) is when companies design custom machines for events and companies. For example, one of my friends Patporn Cheeweewat (his blog) has a company in Thailand which builds custom touch screen devices for events, now that's interesting. I wanna know what I can do to get into something like that. However I did find something useful on one of the company websites that caught my eye. A recommended book list.

I ordered two of the books off of half.com (that place is cheapppp).

"Designing Visual Interfaces" (One of the books on that reading list)
and
"Outliers: The story of success" by Malcolm Gladwell. I read that this is an incredibly inspiring book, ill let you know how these books pan out.