Joel on Software

Contents of Joel on Software, the Book

Contents of the Joel on Software book:

• Introduction (all new!)
• 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
• 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
• Every Crash, Everywhere
• 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 I
• The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions
• Lord Palmerston on Programming
• Measurement
• Foreword to "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 and 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
• Murphy's Law Gone Wild
• How Microsoft Lost the API War
• Microsoft Goes Bonkers
• Our .NET Strategy
• Please Sir May I Have a Linker?
• The Best of Ask Joel

 

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, which lets you organize anything, together, FogBugz, enlightened issue tracking software for bug tracking, and Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.