Well after reading a few of Joel on Software articles I decided to go for his book and this gives me the chance to read nearly all his articles while on the train / bus / tube into work. Also means he gets a few readies for his great work (Well I think it is).

So I've got through the first 4 chapters:

• Choosing a Language
• Back to Basics
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

All of which have given me a great deal to think about, mainly Chapters 3 and 4. The first too really do, do what they say and give you a could insight but here I'm only going to cover 3/4

Chapter 3: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

This is something that everyone should mark their team against all common sense and after a few latest code drops that took longer then they should and a couple of other issues I will definitely try to get our team a higher score against this over the next few months. I make our current rating: 4/12 I suppose I don't have control over all aspects but at least I can try to get the rating up :-)

In the book the article has an update where Joel does indicates he got a few emails from developers and found that most people did score 3/4 so we're not abnormal development team.

Chapter 4: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Well this did open my eyes to a lot of mistakes I've made in the future and will hopefully never make again, as seen time and time again ion CF-TALK and other lists the old Encoding settings this chapter gives a really good insight on why they are there and even more thought on how you should use them very useful chapter

Well the next few chapters (5-8) which I have started to ready as they are the same as the ones on the site are about the Painless Functional Specifications these articles where the ones to make me buy the book so will review then here once I've gone through them again in full and had a little thought about them.

But one thing that does come out in his articles and book is that he is an Ex M$ employee and shows the pitfalls they have made in the past and why they still make some of them.