Joel Spolsky is a globally recognized expert on the software development process. His web site Joel on Software ([...]) is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over 30 languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams. Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed Visual Basic for Applications as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written two books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001) and Joel on Software (Apress, 2004). Joel holds a bachelor's of science degree in computer science from Yale University. Before college, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.

This book covers every imaginable aspect of software programming, from the best way to write code to the best way to design an office in which to write code. The book relates to all software programmers (Microsoft and Open Source), anyone interested in furthering their knowledge of programming, or anyone trying to manage a programmer. Spolsky writes an introduction for the book.

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.