The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

An extraordinary historical artifact. So many project-management ideas we now take for granted were first described in this book more than 50 years ago.

It is worth reading if only because some of these ideas have become so obvious and overused that they are easy to forget or ignore.

✅ Some essays, such as “The Joys of the Craft,” are also a pure delight to read.

🅱️ Still, at least a third of the book is no longer relevant. In some places it is an artifact of its time (consider the project documentation that is periodically printed and mailed to every team member by ordinary post); in others, Brooks simply turned out to be wrong in his predictions.