About Face is sort of the "default textbook" in UX, I gather -- although I'm far from a UX expert myself. One of my first-week Noogler classes was a one-hour lightning overview of UX, and I recognized a lot of adages from Cooper in the slides.

BTW, I believe $VERSION is up to 4; I have version 3 on my shelf, having gotten rid of versions 1 and 2 to save shelf space.