I like this book a lot. Has a heavy focus on physics and an intuitive understanding of physics, rather than just giving a list of heuristics to abide by.
Yes, that's exactly the point. Heuristics is good until it is not. And any heuristics will eventually fail at high enough frequency...
With intuitive understanding you start seeing how various design choices affect the performance and you can focus on checking what might be the cause of the problem and fixing things that have biggest potential for improvement. It allows you to learn from your mistakes whereas with heuristics you feel like a dog that is being beaten by the owner but without any idea why.
