Joel on Software: and on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work With Them in Some Capacity

xvi, 362 pages: illustrations; 23 cm. This is a selection of essays from the author's website. Joel Spolsky started the web log in March 2000 in order to offer his insights, based on years of experience, on how to improve the world of programmingContents: one Bits and Bytes: The Practice of Programming.- one Choosing a Language.- two Back to Basics.- three The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code.- four The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).- five Painless Functional Specifications Part 1: Why Bother.- six Painless Functional Specifications Part 2: What?s a Spec.- seven Painless Functional Specifications Part 3: But How.- eight Painless Functional Specifications Part 4: Tips.- nine Painless Software Schedules.- ten Daily Builds Are Your Friend.- eleven Hard-Assed Bug Fixin.- twelve Five Worlds.- thirteen Paper Prototyping.- fourteen Don?t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You.- fifteen Fire and Motion.- sixteen Craftsmanship.- seventeen Three Wrong Ideas from Computer Science.- eighteen Biculturalism.- nineteen Get Crash Reports From Users?Automatically.- two Managing Developers.- twenty The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing.- twenty-one Incentive Pay Considered Harmful.- twenty-two Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don?t Have Testers.- twenty-three Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.- twenty-four Things You Should Never Do, Part One.- twenty-five The Iceberg Secret, Revealed.- twenty-six The Law of Leaky Abstractions.- twenty-seven Lord Palmerston on Programming.- twenty-eight Measurement.- three Being Joel: Random Thoughts on Not-So-Random Topics.- twenty-nine Rick Chapman Is In Search of Stupidity.- thirty What Is the Work of Dogs in This Country.- thirty-one Getting Things Done When You?re Only a Grunt.- thirty-two Two Stories.- thirty-three Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef.- thirty-four Nothing Is As Simple As It Seems.- thirty-five In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome.- thirty-six Strategy Letter I: Ben & Jerry?s vs. Amazon.- thirty-seven Strategy Letter II: Chicken-and-Egg Problems.- thirty-eight Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back.- thirty-nine Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth.- forty Strategy Letter V: TheEconomics of Open Source.- forty-one A Week of Murphy?s Law Gone Wild.- forty-two How Microsoft Lost the API War.- four A Little Bit Too Much Commentary on .NET.- forty-three Microsoft Goes Bonkers.- forty-four Our .NET Strategy.- forty-five Please Sir May I Have a Linker.- five Appendix.- appendix The Best of Ask Joel. As new; fine.…