Joel On Software….a quick review
I just finished reading the book Joel On Software written by Joel Spolsky. This book is arranged in a very easy to follow format of brief essays/blog entries organized into a collection.
This book spans many topics such as how to pick the best developers, how to conduct developer interviews, how to compose software specifications, daily builds, Unicode and Character sets, Usability Testing, picking your QA dept, picking the proper development language, getting crash reports, and a breakdown of the .net strategy.
Not all of these topics will apply to everyone, but they are all quite entertaining. The sections called “Three topics Computer Science got Wrong” was one of my favorite sections because I can totally relate to the fact that working with remote files should NOT be a “local experience”.
All in all I would recommend this book to any software developer, especially beginners. This isn’t one of those “hold your hand and show you each step” kind of sources, it is more of a “here’s a lot of the follies that befall a development shop and some ways to prevent it from happening to you” sources.
Its actually quite harder to write about this than I thought. It’s hard to review a programming book. Just take my word that each rant of Joel’s in the book there are many golden nuggets of knowledge. I can bet many, if not all of them, could help you out.