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.