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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.

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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, 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 FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.