Permutation City Blog

A collection of essays by various authors selected an introduced by Spolsky. There are some good and bad pieces here. The first easy tickled my fancy. It suggested stopping language style wars. You know the thing: tabs or spaces, braces on the same line or the next, how to capitalize your variables. The solution was for the language's designers to pick a style and encode it into the compiler. Anything that didn't fit the standard would be rejected. It might be harsh but is any style really that much better than any other?

This is a technical look at what you should do to design an interface. I don't think there's anything new here but it's well presented. If you don't know about the subject and you want to learn you could certainly start here.

Joel Spolsky runs a blog about software engineering. This book is made of items from the blog. He's got a lot of good ideas although a couple of them annoyed me (he might still be right though.)