Joel Spolsky has compiled a book of essays on software, which he calls The Best Software Writing I. The essays all came from online sources, but when Spolsky released the chapter listing, I didn’t see anywhere online where he posted links to the originals. So here they are.

Caveat: The print edition may have any number of improvements over the online versions. Nevertheless, as long as some version of the essays exist online, I don’t see a reason not to link to them. Readers who would like to have the authoritative version, with a rather attractive cover, should go buy the book.

I do not have anything to do with Joel Spolsky other than reading his blog occasionally. I am not the rightsholder for any of the offsite content I link to below. (As of June 2005, I haven’t even read most of this, yet.)

some pages that appear to be the original sources for

The Best Software Writing I

Joel Spolsky - Introduction

How I did it

Spolsky released the chapter listing in June 2005, and I noticed that a lot of them were blog posts that I’d read before. I wondered how much of the book was taken from online content. A few minutes of hacking later, and a programmed equivalent of Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” had found most every single chapter, or a page that was one degree of separation away.