This is a book worth checking out, even if you're not a software developer.
— David Bindel, Tea Total
Frustrated by the lack of well-written essays on software engineering, Joel Spolsky (of www.joelonsoftware.com fame) has put together a collection of his favorite writings on the topic.
With a nod to both the serious and funny sides of technical writing, The Best software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky is an entertaining read and a guide to the technical writing literati.
The Best software Writing I contains writings from:
- Ken Arnold
- Leon Bambrick
- Michael Bean
- Rory Blyth
- Adam Bosworth
- danah boyd
- Raymond Chen
- Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi
- Cory Doctorow
- ea_spouse
- Bruce Eckel
- Paul Ford
- Paul Graham
- John Gruber
- Gregor Hohpe
- Ron Jeffries
- Eric Johnson
- Eric Lippert
- Michael Lopp
- Larry Osterman
- Mary Poppendieck
- Rick Schaut
- Aaron Swartz
- Clay Shirky
- Eric Sink
- why the lucky stiff
About The Author
Joel Spolsky is a globally recognized expert on the
software development process. His web site Joel on
software (www.joelonsoftware.com) is popular with
software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty 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 VBA 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 from Yale in computer science. Before college, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.
Reader ReviewsOh yeah, another Joel Spolsky book, just in time for... wha? It's only edited by Joel? Yep. This is a collection of article reprints, some without any editing or reformatting, with small introductions by Joel at the top of each article. That doesn't mean that the book is bad. It just means you need to know what you are getting for your dollars. Myself, I'm not much on the article reprints. Granted, these are solid articles. But many can be found of the web and a book which could just as easily be implemented as a set of links on a web page with some annotations seems like a waste. There are some jewels in here. In particular the Ruby introduction by "why the lucky stiff" which is just freaking awesome. Why APress decided to reprint his work as opposed to just get him to write a whole book is beyond me. He is a real talent in the world of engineer/authors. Especially given some of the competition, which from many proposals I have read have the writing skills of preschoolers on meth. The topics in the book vary too widely for me to recommend this to any particular sub-group of engineer. These articles will be enjoyable to any career engineer who has a passion for the profession.
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