This is easily one of the most important books about software engineering ever written, and remains in my top 3 recommendations for anyone in the software busin

This is easily one of the most important books about software engineering ever written, and remains in my top 3 recommendations for anyone in the software business -- programmers or not. Brooks was the product manager for System/360, IBM's bet-the-company new architecture for mainframe hardware and software. What he learned from managing those dev teams should forever change the way you think about planning and building software. Some takeaways that should make you want to read it... -- Adding people to a software project makes it take longer and have more bugs. -- Added communication is a burden to development, not a help. -- The "4 quadrants" of development and their costs and outputs: product, programming product, programming system, and programming system product. BTW, the "mythical man-month" in the title refers to how many people it will take and how many months to finish some software product or feature. Brooks calls this mythical (and proves that it is) yet it remains the basis of all of today's nutty "Sprint" planning system!