Some reviews of The Best Software Writing I:

Rooneg::Weblog: “The whole book is fantastic though, and you should absolutely pick it up when it’s available in dead tree form, I know I intend to.”

Marc A. Garrett: “Mr. Spolsky, with the help of his readers, has assembled an outstanding collection of essays. A few of them are likely to be as relevant five years from now as they are today, and that’s saying something. Highly recommended.”

Where else can you get Rory’s hysterical comic strip about how people use Excel as a database (“I’ll have to take a photo of the printout with my Kodak Funtime digital camera…”) alongside Adam Bosworth’s ISCON talk saying basically the same thing (“That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel-cored…”)? Where else will you find Bruce Eckel’s proposal to use unit tests as a replacement for strong type checking to insure correctness of applications written in late-bound scripting languages, alongside Leon Bambrick’s hysterical critique of Windows Search (“Why is a dog asking me questions?”) Where else will you find the most important writing about social interfaces, from danah boyd’s brilliant dismissal of social networking products (“Why on earth should we encourage people to perform a mental disorder in the digital world?”) to Clay Shirky on Kaycee Nicole (“changing your identity is really weird”)?

Well… on the inkernet, I guess, but if you like to read in the bath, while driving, or in the Himalayas, or you want to preserve your eyesight for that hunting trip you’ve been planning, you should read the dead-trees version.

The Best Software I is available from Amazon.com and on all the local Amazon sites (although some of the international ones still have an old title for the book — you’ll have to search for “Joel Spolsky”). And I was just joking about reading while driving.