As much as I hate to praise anyone at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this is really an interesting and valuable book.
Above, splinky highlights some of the main points contained in the book. I completely agree with him regarding the overall quality and value of the book and just wanted to add a few comments from a differentperspective.

I got my hands on the 20th Anniversary Edition of The MM-M which includes 4 new chapters. As noted above, the quality and continuing relevance of the author's original writings/ideas (in 1975) is impressive. The new chapeters, added in 1995, are devoted to reexamination of those ideas, updating his theories, and debating certain criticisms of his original book.

I am not a software engineer and I do not make my living writing computer programs. I have never seen the IBM System/360 that serves as an example for so many of the author's theories and experiences. Despite all that, I still found a lot of valuable ideas in this book (really a short collection of essays). And Brooks himself notes that a significant amount of correspondence regarding the original work has come from outside the field of computer science/software engineering. Most of the more general ideas apply to anyone managing people or complex systems.

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