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The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
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| List Price: | £19.99 |
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Product Description
Frustrated by the lack of well-written essays on software engineering, Joel Spolsky (of www.joelonsoftware.com fame) has put together a collection of his favorite writings on the topic. With a nod to both the serious and funny sides of technical writing, The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky is an entertaining read and a guide to the technical writing literati. The Best Software Writing I contains writings from: Ken Arnold Leon Bambrick Michael Bean Rory Blyth Adam Bosworth danah boyd Raymond Chen Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi Cory Doctorow ea_spouse Bruce Eckel Paul Ford Paul Graham John Gruber Gregor Hohpe Ron Jeffries Eric Johnson Eric Lippert Michael Lopp Larry Osterman Mary Poppendieck Rick Schaut Aaron Swartz Clay Shirky Eric Sink why the lucky stiff
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #246479 in Books
- Published on: 2005-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 328 pages
Customer Reviews
This is great.
I like this book. I have been a reader of Joel Spolskys website for many years now, and enjoy his irreverent style and interesting analysis, so any writing he reckons is good enough to put in a book is worth reading as far as I'm concerned. This book begins to treat people who are interested in software as normal people rather than A. Dummies B. Nerds or C. People with too much money who are willing to buy books that dont really tell you anything.
The book itself is made up of articles (from 1 page to a 10) taken from websites, and have everything from cartoon foxes to stick men with fangs. The articles are all inspiring, entertaining or interesting or all three. This book is well worth the purchas price.
I'm looking forward to II
Worth owning
I have seen other reviewers say that all of this information is freely available. The articles are; that's true, however the foreword to each article, written by Spolsky, are not. The forewords are insightful and some are even quite detailed. Also, if you are interested in this book, you are obviously a fan of Joel's writing style, thus the forewords add something not available for free on the web.
Personally I found the reading of the book to be very enjoyable - I finished it in just a couple of days. While, I did not enjoy each article as much as some, I did enjoy the majority and got something to take away and explore further. The main overall theme (a pragmatic approach to software development) was presented and exemplified well using material from a variety of authors.
Some of the articles about development process are definitely worth giving to managers to read - to give them an insight into what really makes developers tick.
Recommended if you're an avid Joel On Software reader, or if you're interested in hearing from some of the great minds involved in the software development industry today.
Not your usual software book
Straight from the cover, it's clear that this is not a usual "software book". The Best Software Writing I is a collection of weblog posts from 2004, hand picked by Joel Spolsky. This book is a true mirror of the blogging community, displaying all the variety of Web - articles range from three picture comics to 15 page essays, comming straight from the minds of programming celebrities like Ken Arnold, Bruce Eckel and Ron Jeffries, but also people of whom you probably never heard and some who even remained anonymous. With such mix-and-match combination this book covers typical software topics like coding style, usability and overtime, but also lessons learned from project failures, appraisals of great hackers, transaction management strategies in coffee shops and software autism.
The book lives up to its title and truly is a great collection of thoughts, rants, insights and humor. It is not something that will grab your attention and push you to read it from cover to cover in a single breath, but rather like web itself, allows you to jump from topic to topic, tuning in and out at your convenience.
An obvious question raised by the very concept of this book is why should someone pay for content that can be freely downloaded - in my eyes, having such gems compiled, cleaned from the weblog trash of `top 10 ways', `best 5 libraries' or `worst 7 mistakes', and packed into less than 300 pages of paper which you can carry while commuting, is well worth it.
The I in the title suggests that this book was intended to be first in a series, but it seems that the sequel was not yet published - it would really be a shame if Apress do not follow this up with Best Software Writing II.
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Gojko Adzic
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