As you can see from here, I am reading quite a few books lately. I am not a speed reader and so I dont get to read all the books that I want to. The reading list has changed after I wrote this page – i finished a couple, moved some to future reading list, stopped some in the middle and added quite a few to the list. I hope to update the list to reflect the changes soon.

I just completed reading a book called “The Best Software Writings I – Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky”. As the name implies, it is a collection of articles relating to software selected by celebrity blogger Joel Spolsky from submissions by his blog readers. He gives a brief introduction to the author and the topic of the article at the beginning of each chapter. Sometimes the introduction is better than the actual essay. A few of the articles are excellent, some are good and a few are mediocre. The quality forms the Bell curve of standard normal distribution. Nobody can get it all right. Not even Joel. All except one of the articles in the book are available online. So I intend to post the links here so that you can read them for free (sorry Joel).

1. Style Is Substance by Ken Arnold
2. Award For The Silliest User Interface: Windows Search by Leon Bambrick
3. The Pitfalls Of Outsourcing Programmers – Why Some Software Companies Confuse The Box With The Chocolates by Michael Bean
4. Excel As A Database by Rory Blyth
5. ICSOC04 Talk by Adam Bosworth
6. Autistic Social Software by danah boyd
7. Why Not Just Block the Apps That Rely on Undocumented Behaviour ? by Raymond Chen
8. Kicking the Llama by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi
9. Save Canada’s Internet from WIPO by Cory Doctorow
10. EA: The Human Story by ea_spouse
11. Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing by Bruce Eckel
12. Processing Processing by Paul Ford
13. Great Hackers by Paul Graham
14. The Location Field is the New Command Line by John Gruber
15. Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit by Gregor Hohpe
16. Passion by Ron Jeffries
17. C++ – The Forgotten Trojan Horse by Eric Johnson
18. How Many Microsoft Employees Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb? by Eric Lippert
19. What to Do When You’re Screwed by Michael “Rands” Lopp
20. Larry’s Rules of Software Engineering #2 by Larry Osterman
21. Team Compensation by Mary Poppendieck [Not Available Online]
22. Mac Word 6.0 by Rick Schaut
23. A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky
24. Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software by Clay Shirky
25. Closing the Gap, Part 1 by Eric Sink
26. Closing the Gap, Part 2 by Eric Sink
27. Hazards of Hiring by Eric Sink
28. PowerPoint Remix by Aaron Swartz
29. A Quick (and hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) by why the lucky stiff

I should say Joel saved the best for the last. All in all, this was an interesting read. I would surely buy Part 2 if and when it comes out.

Currently I am reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg which is about the development of Chandler.