This is a selection of essays from the author's Web site, http://www.joelonsoftware.com. Joel Spolsky started the web log in March 2000 in order to offer his insights, based on years of experience, on how to improve the world of programming. His extraordinary writing skills, technical knowledge, and caustic wit have made him a programming guru....

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is the next big step in evolution for Web services. This book is the first to educate people about SOA, and to introduce them to the technologies that they can use today, prior to the release of Indigo. It will introduce them to a new architecture and will help them realize why Web services are such a big deal...

Originally created as a powerful text processing tool, Perl has since evolved into a multi-purpose, multi-platform language capable of implementing a variety of tasks such as system administration, CGI and network programming, XML processing, and more. Beginning Perl, Second Edition provides valuable insight into Perl's role in...

Reverend Bill Blunden tells all: who’s going offshore, who’s helping them do it, and why. In addition to presenting the pro-globalization stance of corporate America, Reverend Blunden gives voice to dissenting opinions that have largely been ignored by the media. This book offers an enlightening, detailed analysis...

This book introduces new features of recent WSH versions, then discusses...

Beginning .NET Game Programming in VB .NET presents the work of David Weller (.NET Game evangelist at Microsoft) and a group of key Microsoft insiders who decided to write the ideal introduction to game programming for VB .NET programmers. Weller has switched his previous book to VB .NET and added a bonus chapter. The book...

Truth is often stranger than fiction, especially when it comes to the workplace. In Cube Farm, author Bill Blunden recounts his three years in Minnesota performing research and development for Lawson Software. Riddled with intrigue, duplicity and collusion, this story offers a trench-level view of a company in the...

This book goes the extra...

Many Java developers tend to treat Oracle as a "black box"; as a consequence, developers tend...

Nearly any application you build requires some form of output. And the output format may change on a regular basis, which can lead to a heavy maintenance burden and a restrictive test cycle. But by utilizing the power of the Velocity template engine, you can integrate templated output into your application, decoupling the application logic...

Foundations of JSP Design Patterns gives you the tools to build scalable enterprise applications using JSP. While other books merely provide instruction on basic JSP and servlet development, this insightful guide goes a step further to offer a variety of best practices and design principles, enabling you to build your own scalable and...