Book Review: Joel on Software

This book is a collection of essays and blog rants by Joel Spolsky, who makes a splash here and starts a flame there over something he said that somebody else took the wrong way. You can read his essays online, but I prefer to hold a book in my hands and spare my eyes. I put enough strain on them every day.

Joel is an opinionated person, and he is vocal in delivering his opinions. What I appreciate is that he knows what he’s talking about. You might disagree with him on some points (I do), but it helps to see other people’s perspective on project management, coding purity, passion for software, employee relations, etc. In fact, I think this book is about forging your own opinion about things you’ll read about.

For example, I disagree with Joel on his definition of “bloatware.” In my opinion, ICQ is a perfect example of “bloatware”: a product that has no direction, no consistency of UI, and—worst of all—comes full of crap such as silly online games, “extras” and other junk.

I particularly enjoyed his essays on project and people management. In fact, had this book been written a few year ago, I would’ve bought a copy for each of my managers from the previous job.

Sales reps committing to ridiculous deadlines (“Next week!”), developers slaving evenings and week-ends to save the company’s ass over unrealistic promises pulled out of thin air, then flying sales reps over to Puerto Rico to celebrate their “achievements” and a “successful quarter”, and so forth. Sounds familiar to anyone? I wish my managers understood that the only people who can give time estimates are the ones who are going to write code! They would’ve learned a lot of other useful things about software shops from this book.

I saw a review that this book had too much of a marketing pitch of the products Joel develops for living. I didn’t think so. If you want a book full of marketing pitches, read Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML. I could hardly sit through that one.

In closing, I’d like to point out the book is not for Microsoft zealots only. It’s for developers and project managers from all walks of the IT industry. There’s enough substance there about Windows and Unix, open source and proprietary code.

Enjoy reading!