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Let me just take a minute to congratulate Mike Gunderloy, author of the book Painless Project Management with FogBugz, on the breathtaking review he received in this month's Dr. Dobbs Journal: “This book is brief, to the point, lavishly illustrated... This book is a user guide, but it is to user guides what Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language is to language manuals. Every question I had was answered within a paragraph or two of being raised; every explanation made sense... I think we'll all be better off if this book will become the standard against which other end-user documentation will be measured.” Wow!

That review was written by Greg Wilson, who, coincidentally, is one of the authors of a fascinating paper called Mining Student CVS Repositories for Performance Indicators [PDF], which is an interesting look at the same kind of data on performance variation between student programmers as I presented recently in Hitting the High Notes.

Moving right along... there's an audio interview of me online now at IT Conversations, talking about the book I just edited, The Best Software Writing I. In that interview, I praised a book called Internationalization with Visual Basic by Michael Kaplan. I really didn't understand Unicode until I read that book, and since it's out of print, it usually costs around $100 on Amazon, but it saved our skin making FogBugz and CityDesk work right.

Kaplan is writing a lot on his blog Sorting It All Out; he's one of the best Microsoft bloggers out there. Hopefully we'll see another book on international software from him soon.

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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