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Summary: The more things change ...
Review: ... the more they stay the same. Never was that adage more true then in this case. This book truly is one of the timeless classics on software engineering. The same mistakes we make and moan about today were being made back in the 1960s. Mr. Brooks points them out, analyzes them, and offers his ideas on why they happen and how things can be improved.This "Anniversary" edition includes some additional material, as well as the author's commentary on what has changed -- and what has not. Even that which no longer applies is educational, in that it shows us how things have evolved. But by and large, most of what Mr. Brooks wrote back in 1975 still applies in 2000. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. If you are involved in software engineering, you will need to know what this book talks about. You might as well read it now, rather then finding out the hard way.
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Summary: You'll want to buy a copy for your manager
Review: I had been in the industry as a programmer for ten years before reading this book. As I read it, I saw outlined, in vivid detail, mistakes I'd seen played out over and over again by my own senior management. I continue to wonder why, if Brooks knew this stuff back in '75, people in the industry still can't get it through their heads 25 years later. Everyone in the software industry should read this book. Management should read it so they can stop making the same mistakes, and designers should read it so they know when a project is doomed and how to find an organization that knows how to face reality.
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Summary: Must Have for Software Engieers and Managers
Review: This book falls into the category of a must have for any Software Engineer or manager. Its as insightful today as it was in 1975. Ever wonder why things go worse when your manager adds more people to the team and trims the deadline? Brooks has the answer. This book is not a fast read, but a great book to sit and think and discuss. We used it as a lunch time forum book where I worked, takling an essay a week. It made for some great conversations.
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Summary: A few nuggets of knowledge...
Review: ...but being a product of 1990's Computer Science academia it's hard not to feel like you inately "know" what Brooks espouses. Perhaps this is just a testament to the effect of the book. Being a couple decades old, it appears to have changed the way generations of software engineers work and think and consequently my generation is a product. If you're looking to pop your head up out of deeply technical work and look at more managerial, business oriented material (that nevertheless contains technical stuff too) then this is a great book with which to start.
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Summary: are your deadlines an exercise in futility?
Review: I find myself going back to this book regularly as management tries to double the size of a team in order to cut development time in half, or make supervisors out of great technical people. Normally when you read a technology book as old as this one, its distracting to see how much things have changed; in this case, its sobering to see how little things have changed. Brooks' project examples are artifacts of another era, but teams are still failing to deliver quality software on time for all the same reasons they were then. There's room for disagreement with some things in the Mythical Man-Month (most of which are addressed in the new chapters at the end), but it convinced me that making project deadlines doesn't have to be a roll of the dice, and gave me the insight to start looking at software development as a process instead of as an accident.
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Summary: Prophetic -- but of its time
Review: There really are very few software engineering books written in 1975 that are worth reading today. Brooks remains powerful stuff because large system projects are still often disastrous. We are not often bothered by the flowcharts that Brooks dislikes, but the disorganized projects, endless meetings, problems of scaling, unhelpful documentation and inflexible systems are certainly still with us. I was struck recently by the parallels with Kent Beck's Extreme Programming: Brooks had in his way foreseen much of what this recent movement has been urging. Brooks' classic book underlies much systems engineering thinking, and his example along with the frightening story of OS/360, enlivened with Brooks' inimitable anecdotes and illustrations, remains essential reading.
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Summary: Quite good, and useful for other areas of life!
Review: I read the book at a casual pace (3 weeks), and found it to be quite good. Actually, it was quite interesting to see how the technology has changed since the book was written. I find that the essay's are useful for other areas of life as well. Of particular interest to me was the man-month chapter, and it's relation to Y2K resource planning.
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Summary: Timeless
Review: After recommending this book to a friend, I thought it might be helpful for others to add a review here. I first read this book about 20 years ago - few books on the subject can stand the test of an ever-changing knowledge domain like this one has. It is a must-read for every software manager and probably every software designer.
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Summary: Best thoughts mixed with the worst ones
Review: Even, if you probably know all of the useful advices of this book, you should read it anyway; since not knowing ONE of this advices may be deadly to your projects. Maybe the 2 most important statements are: - that some programmers are 10 times better than others (even if they have equal experience) - a project's architecture has to be defined be one or two persons only. But there are many others great ideas in this book! The amazing part of it comes from huge errors in some other statements, so reader, be careful ! I was especially astonished by the incredible stupidity of the following statement : "No major improvement in the software engeneering area will never appear" (this is called : "No Silver Bullet"). I mean, does this guy (the author) knows that we, poor programmers, spend almost all of our time coding the same things again and again, because they just can not be 'caught' in functions or classes ? If anyone has just coded any tiny piece of software, he really can feel how huge the room for improvement still is in software engineering.
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Summary: The all-time classic book on software engineering
Review: The Mythical Man-Month is a collection of papers on software engineering. It contains the classic pappers "No Silver Bullet", "The Mythical Man-Month", "The Second-System Effect" and others. Every software project manager should read these. I only rated this 4 stars because the book has become somewhat out of date on some issues. It assumes the reader is using primitive software development techniques and for that reason a FEW of the observations don't hold true today. Never the less this book is a classic and if you wan't to be "in the know", you must read it.
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