A related book that examines some of the same themes is Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6596.html http://press.princeton.edu

A related book that examines some of the same themes is Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6596.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6596.html The examples he draws from are nuclear power plant failures (TMI in particular), civil aviation and oil transport. But the basics will be recognizable to anyone who has dealt with large computing installations; interactive complexity, tight coupling and cascading failures. It is not a reassuring book, you won't be able to look at any complex system without asking yourself what sequence of simple, predictable failures of widely separated parts could tip it into a catastrophic failure mode.