Joel “on Software” Splosky put together a Best of Software Writing anthology filled with articles he’s cadged from blogs and other web-writing (he kindly included my Boing Boing post on Notice and Takedown regimes in Canada). The contributor list is fantastic:
Ken Arnold,
Leon Bambrick.
Michael Bean,
Rory Blyth,
Adam Bosworth,
danah boyd,
Raymond Chen,
Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi,
Cory Doctorow,
ea_spouse,
Bruce Eckel,
Paul Ford,
Paul Graham,
John Gruber,
Gregor Hohpe,
Ron Jeffries,
Eric Johnson,
Eric Lippert,
Michael Lopp,
Larry Osterman,
Mary Poppendieck,
Rick Schaut,
Aaron Swartz,
Clay Shirky,
Eric Sink,
why the lucky stiff
The book is out now — I’m looking forward to getting my copy!
The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!
