by Joel Spolsky

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

 

About the author.

In 2000 I co-founded Fog Creek Software, where we created lots of cool things like the FogBugz bug tracker, Trello, and Glitch. I also worked with Jeff Atwood to create Stack Overflow and served as CEO of Stack Overflow from 2010-2019. Today I serve as the chairman of the board for Stack Overflow, Glitch, and HASH.