Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

Joel takes a programmer’s view and tries to bring it into all phases of software development - being either product managers or small companies developing internal software. As an ex-Microsoft employee working on Excel and VBA he is sharing his knowledge and some best practices and some, well… not so uncommon practices encountered in the software industry.

It has a really good section on conducting technical interviews and the programmer ideal environment for maximum productivity, to which all respectable companies should adhere to.

It’s also funny from the perspective that most of the chapters are written around and after the dot-com bubble and most of his predictions are spot-on :) And as all predictions some are a bit off, but not too many. What is really interesting is that he’s talking about functional tests and continuous integration, and let’s remember that the articles were written more than 10 years ago. Towards the ending of the book he’s discussing a bit the “newly” introduced .NET framework, which again is a fun read about expectations and design/backwards compatibility.

As usual, you can find the book on Amazon or Goodreads, if you’re looking for more information or a place to grab a copy.

Also, Joel keeps a very cool blog with news about programming and other interesting topics.