Dated, but not out-dated. Brooks makes so very many interesting observations and so clear that this book has influence the science of software development.
The book is a set of lessons learned during his time as a project manager for OS/360. It opens with a Dutch proverb
Een schip po het strand is een baken in zee.
A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea.
This is an enumeration of things he did right and wrong during his tenure in that position with IBM.
Just shy of 200 pages, published by Addison-Wesley.
He's mainly concerned with massive projects in this book, but it's also Some of the things he anticipated:
Need to get into a rhythm during debugging - code/test/code/test. Of course he was on a batch system, where this issue extremely critical, but it also applies to interactive systems.
Javadoc seems a quite obvious utility for keeping external and internal documentation correct and consistent.
Using stubs, top-down design and stepwise refinement are standard practice for most programmers - not replaced by structured programming and OO design, but augmented by them.
Importance of a "project notebook," a documentation librarian, a code librarian, tool-builders, separate testers, etc. are also standard practice.
He also explains (in the first chapter) why adding more people to a late project makes it more late: increases the communications burden, and takes resources to bring the new people up to speed.
I'm been meaning to read this book for a very, very long time, and have only just now gotten to it. I really ought to have read it sooner. This is a pleasant, simple, and quick read of just a few hours.
