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> Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. Tell that to Claude Shannon, Fred Brooks, and Ken Thompson.

• abraae 8y ago
  The Mythical Man-month has: - aged extremely well in some ways (it still takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women are assigned to the project) - aged poorly in others (disk space is no longer an issue when deciding whether to comment on code) - remained ahead of its time in others (its a good idea to have an architect to ensure the conceptual integrity of a complex system, rather than to have developers hack it out a bit at a time in a series of scrums)
• coldtea 8y ago
  There are exceptions of course (and those are more about the fundamentals and abstractions than the technology -- e.g. Mythical Man Month is more about people and processes and development approaches than technology). Thought note that even those are barely ancient, they are at best a century old -- Lewis was talking of Plato as an example and in general centuries old classics, not whether someone should read Zola or Hesse. Today very few would suggest reading Newton to learn physics in university (e.g. use it as a textbook). At best they'd tell to to read Newton to see how the thinking went behind early discoveries. But people use Plato or Shakespeare or tons of other centuries old writers as their core textbook all the time in philosophy and literature departments.