Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

by Avram Joel Spolsky

Overview

* Covers three years of the best essays.

* Essays range from technical to humorous, but are always tangible.

* Beautifully written and extremely timely.

* Google lists 183,000 links for "Joel on Software".

* Spolsky is one of the most popular programmers around today, with legions of followers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590593899
Publisher:	Apress
Publication date:	08/16/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	7.01(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Joel Spolsky is a globally recognized expert on the software development process. His web site Joel on Software (JoelonSoftware.com) is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over 30 languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams. Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed Visual Basic for Applications as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written two books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001) and Joel on Software (Apress, 2004). Joel holds a bachelor's of science degree in computer science from Yale University. Before college, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.

Table of Contents

• Choosing a Language
• Back to Basics
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• Painless Functional Specifications Part 1: Why Bother?
• Painless Functional Specifications Part 2: What's a Spec?
• Painless Functional Specifications Part 3: But . . . How?
• Painless Functional Specifications Part 4: Tips
• Painless Software Schedules
• Daily Builds Are Your Friend
• Hard-Assed Bug Fixin'
• Five Worlds
• Paper Prototyping
• Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• Fire and Motion
• Craftsmanship
• Three Wrong Ideas from Computer Science
• Biculturalism
• Get Crash Reports From Users—Automatically!
• The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing
• Incentive Pay Considered Harmful
• Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers
• Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
• Things You Should Never Do, Part One
• The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions
• Lord Palmerston on Programming
• Measurement
• Rick Chapman Is In Search of Stupidity
• What Is the Work of Dogs in This Country?
• Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt
• Two Stories
• Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef
• Nothing Is As Simple As It Seems
• In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome
• Strategy Letter I: Ben & Jerry's vs. Amazon
• Strategy Letter II: Chicken-and-Egg Problems
• Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
• Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
• Strategy Letter V: The Economics of Open Source
• A Week of Murphy's Law Gone Wild
• How Microsoft Lost the API War
• Microsoft Goes Bonkers
• Our .NET Strategy
• Please Sir May I Have a Linker?

Editorial Reviews

Spolsky is knowledgeable, funny and free of unnecessary religious fervor. Joel on Software is a must-read for developers, product managers and those who want more insight into the world of developing software.

Slashdot.org