Software Development Professionals Need Better Writing Skills

Filed in archive Management on April 2, 2006

I just finished a second review last week of a new AJAX book that is to be published this month. Overall it was a really good book. The one thing that stuck out about the book was that the author actually knew how to keep his readers interested through relevant side stories, humor and other techniques. It was one of the few times that I read a technical book and didn't fall asleep or want to stick a fork in my eye to stay awake because I absolutely had to learn what it was I was reading about.

Joel Spolsky has a recent entry on his site in which he says the following:

The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I'm going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I'm not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it's going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft's buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!


That is pretty funny stuff but so true. With the large numbers of people in the IT profession you would think that the publishing companies could do a better job at finding authors that could effectively communicate the written word.