Description
Book Synopsis* 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.
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?
