It's a worthy goal, but this Guide is a strange document. It's only 335 pages long, yet rather than just presenting an outline of the subject and referring to o

It's a worthy goal, but this Guide is a strange document. It's only 335 pages long, yet rather than just presenting an outline of the subject and referring to other sources for detailed treatments, it also tries to present some basic knowledge for each topic itself. It's hard to see how even the most expert contributors and skilled editors could compress a whole industry of knowledge that much and end up with something useful. Inevitably, much of the specific knowledge presented in the Guide is simplified to the point of arguably being wrong, dated to the point of arguably being obsolete, or just missing the point altogether. As someone else pointed out, this is only a "guide to" the field of software engineering. It does cite additional references as well (details in appendix C), though there are only 36 references supporting the entire Guide and some of them are old and of debatable relevance to modern software development. This edition of the Guide is nearly a decade old now, so it obviously doesn't include references to good books that have been published more recently and adopt a more objective, evidence-led style when discussing which modern practices actually work that was sorely lacking in most books from a decade or two ago.