I wrote a book!

The title is Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent.

It is, as promised, concise. Even though it’s hardback, it’s about the size of a paperback romance novel, with wider margins, and about 180 pages, including some blank ones.

To pad it out, Apress hired my favorite illustrator, Terry Colon, to illustrate it. He did a fantastic job (the cover illustration at right will give you a feel for his style). His goofy, frantic, manically hilarious illustrations are reason enough to buy the book.

Here’s what you get:

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Hitting the High Notes”
• Chapter 2: “Finding Great Developers”
• Chapter 3: “A Field Guide to Developers”
• Chapter 4: “Sorting Resumes”
• Chapter 5: “The Phone Screen”
• Chapter 6: “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”
• Chapter 7: “Fixing Suboptimal Teams”
• Appendix: “The Joel Test”

As you know, I write first and foremost for the web, so most of this material originated as Joel on Software articles. As usual, I did a bunch of reorganizing, reformatting, and rewriting to make it into a book-quality thing that you can read from beginning to end, and, since it’s such a short book, you should be able to do that during the commercials of a typical half-hour sitcom.

It’s cheap, about $13 on Amazon right now, so get your copy now before they run out.