What I am reading

Technical - "The Best Software Writing"

This book is a collection of essays about software development written by various authors, selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky. Joel write a web column Joel On Software and in this book is his reaction to having to read yet another boring book on software development.

The essays range from some musings on social software by Clay Shirky, to Paul Graham essay on great hackers (from the book "Hackers and Painters"), to a short introduction to the programming language Ruby.

There are couple of essays that short and whimsical, but deal with serious topics. Some of these are: "Starbucks Does Not Use Two Phase Commit" or "How Many Microsoft Employees Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb".

The book ends with three essays by Eric Sink on some problems facing small software companies. Two of his articles are about marketing and one on hiring programmers.

I really liked this book and I'm making all my friends read it.

posted by richieb @ 4:51 PM