I read this as an EE teaching a class on microcontrollers which has me going outside of my hardware comfort zone. The text was interesting, if I didn't mind cringing at all the male pronouns and references to god. (Which was a LOT of cringing.) ( )

I read this just after publication, and was absorbed in the story. I was lucky enough to get to work on the first IBM 360 computers (which this story is about) and it was so very relevant to my work. And it was a fine tome on management. ( )

Good essence with many interesting lessons that still hold true. However, I fell most of it is only interesting from an historical perspective as so much has changed in the field. ( )

This book was written in the sixties, yet, I find its recommendations and requirements for software development are just as helpful, humorous and educational in the 21st century. I still don't understand how they got any work done back then with manually teletypes, printed requirements documents being updated everyday and the like, but they still had the exact same problems we do now.

The two things I took away most, "the more people you add to a late project, the later the project is." Along with the title of the mythical man month, is the idea "nine women can't make a baby in a month." The other point, was that whatever your estimate is for development time, you need to consider at least twice as much for validation. This is counter intuitive, you develop it once, you test it once, and that test takes less time than writing code did, but there is so much more. The covers testing for each release, it covers finding regressions later, and any other issue that may be written against that piece of code that wasn't exposed when it was first authored. These good testers make bug fixing much easier. ( )

This has held up amazingly well for a book about software engineering written in 1975. Fred Brook's insight into human behaviour is still spot-on even though the technical details can be amusing when you realize that their mainframe had less storage capacity than an RFID tag… ( )