Review: The Best Software Writing I · 567 words posted 06/17/2005 12:02 PM
On the face of it, “reading about code” is akin to “listening to paint”: it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t sound like much fun. Too many software blogs amount to turgid ephemera; it’s hard to write something that’s both timely and timeless when Ajax is super-now and Flash is super-yesterday. Joel Spolsky understands this, and has carefully assembled The Best Software Writing I, an omnibus that truly lives up to its title.
[Full disclosure: I submitted an article for inclusion in this book; alas, it was not selected. Normally this would disqualify any self-respecting critic from reviewing the book in question. But hey, who’s writing my checks? Not you buck-o.]
Much of the writing is pithy, and some is laugh-out-loud funny. In Award for the Silliest User Interface, Leon Bambrick asks of Windows search:
- Why is a dog asking me questions?
- Who put the mescaline in the Microsoft kool aid?
- What if Google used this approach?
- Would Google Still be number one?
Bambrick then imagines a friendly Google search cow.
Mr. Spolsky has also weeded out the froth: whuffie is nowhere to be found in the index. Instead, many of the best pieces grok how the web works, or at least how it should work. Here’s Paul Ford on Processing Processing:
Looking at Processing, I find myself thinking: I wish the web worked like this. I don’t wish the web was a collection of little clickable graphics, but rather, I wish that people would take a step back and look at everything we’ve done and “elegantize” the Web as a construct, define a set of core goals that web developers want to solve and create as small as possible a language, based on the smallest possible set of principles, that will help them meet those goals. At this point in my life as a web developer, I don’t want tutorials on hacking my CSS so it looks good in IE5.2 for the Macintosh (I’m about to give up on that very thing, in fact, after dozens of hours); rather, I want an answer to the question “what is a link?” I don’t want someone to make it easier, another Dreamweaver or FrontPage, I want it to be elegant, like the computer language Scheme is elegant.
Other standouts include John Gruber’s The Location Field is the New Command Line and Michael’s Bean balanced The Pitfalls of Outsourcing Programmers. My favorite piece is Adam Bosworth’s exceptional ICSOC04 Talk on the tension between complex specs and the need for rapid user adoption.
It’s also a pleasure to read A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby without any hyperventilating about Ruby on Rails.
The book isn’t perfect. If you already read about code you’ve probably previously encountered several of the essays. Eric Sink gets not one, not two, but three entries. His writing is fine, but when it’s freely available on the web the book could use more breadth and less depth. And do we really need another reminder of Cory Doctorow’s ubiquity?
Shortcomings aside, you could seek out most or all of these pieces on the web, but why would you want to? In The Best Software Writing I Mr. Spolsky, with the help of his readers, has assembled an outstanding collection of essays. A few of them are likely to be as relevant five years from now as they are today, and that’s saying something. Highly recommended.
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