Rating: 
Summary: poor rehash of famous big-budget disasters
Review: This book's subtitle is "Lessons Learned from Massive Software Project Failures." A more accurate subtitle would be "Assortment of InformationWeek articles written about costly failures that involved software." This is a shallow and superficial book. There is no original research, no original reporting, and no deep analysis. Sometimes there are three separate articles on the same failed software project! This is pointless repetition, not any type of deeper analysis. It's like reading a xeroxed collection of articles, except it's in a glossy cover. The "author" writes a few paragraphs before and after each project. The quantification, if there is any, involves the dollars exchanged in the settlement between the two companies. No numbers about anything technical ever appear. This is a good book if you're a consultant and you want some scary stories to tell a CIO. If you want advice, read one of Steve McConnell's books.
Rating: 
Summary: Valuable to managers and project managers
Review: This is a collection of project disasters with an eye towards the major project management failures rather than the technical issues. Though many of these have been previously published, the assembly is worth price of the book. This will be is valuable for anybody involved in high-level decision making on mission-critical (and smaller) IT/Internet software projects. If you want to educate your boss on why you can't begin work without clear objectives, scope, senior management involvement, etc., a few of these stories should clear his/her head. All the B-to-B internet hubs run by consortia should read this or be ready to end up in vol II.
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