“The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

That’s from my introduction to The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky, now in bookstores. It includes 29 great short pieces of brilliant, insightful, and often hysterically funny stuff about software. You can read the introduction here.