Book Review: Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software. APress, 2004, 1590593898, 362 pages.

Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software collects some of the witty, insightful articles he has written over the past four years. If you’re a developer, Spolsky’s weblog is a must-read: his observations on hiring programmers, measuring how well a dev team is doing its job, the API wars, and other topics are always entertaining and informative. Over the course of forty-five short chapters, he ranges from the specific to the general and back again, tossing out pithy observations on the commoditization of the operating system, why you need to hire more testers, and why NIH (the not-invented-here syndrome) isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most of this material is still available on-line, but having it in one place, edited, with an index, is probably the best twenty-five dollars you’ll spend this year.