Agylen

Joel on Software, by Joel Spolsky.

This book by the well-known software developer, entrepreneur and blogger Joel Spolsky is a comprehensive collection of the most interesting articles that have appeared on the Joel on Software website in the course of the last five years.

If you're a devote follower of Joel, like me, there's almost nothing here that you haven't probably already read online. Still, it can be useful to have all this content nicely reorganized and reprinted. As Joel puts it, the book is a heck of a lot more cohesive than the website, where by cohesive I mean «can be read in the bathtub without fear of electrocution.» At the very least, it can be a nice present from a developer to his/her manager, who might get a couple of clues they're still missing.

Inside here, there's plenty of clues indeed and Joel will be very happy to share them with his readers, drawing from his experience as developer, program manager at Microsoft, software entrepreneur and Israeli paratrooper.

Not everything here has to do with technical matters, but you'll also find something about the economy, managing people, business strategy and insulating pipes. This makes for a pleasant and varied reading, particularly if your ambitions go beyond being a good developer. In any case, you can count on the first third of the book to give you plenty of advice in this respect, while the second third deals with managing developers. The third part is a semi-random collection of topics, the majority of which deal with strategy. At the end of the book, you can find three articles on .NET and an appendix with questions and answers taken from the website.

Joel's basic approach can be described as very down-to-earth, beware-of-hype, no-silver-bullet philosophy. This is not to say that what he writes is bland and clichéd. Quite the contrary. He does not refrain from being original and even controversial at times, at the risk of being unpopular in denouncing the excess hype that sometimes surrounds topics like eXtreme Programming or Open Source, or attacking entrenched myths like network transparency or software reuse.

In any case, he his always witty, sometimes downright humorous and never haughty.

Highly recommended!