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The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
The Mythical ManMonth Essays on Software Engineering Author:Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. An eminent computer expert, Brooks has written a collection of thought-provoking essays on the management of computer programming projects. These essays draw from his own experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 and for OS/360, its operating system. — In the essays, the author blends facts on software engineering with his own personal... more » opinions and the opinions of others involved in building complex computer systems. He not only gives the reader the benefit of the lessons he has learned from the OS/360 experience, but he writes about them in an extremely readable and entertaining way.
Although formulated as separate essays, the book expresses a central argument. Brooks believes that large programming projects suffer management problems different in kind from small ones due to the division of labor. For this reason he feels that the critical need is for conceptual integrity of the product itself, and in essay form he explores both the difficulties of achieving this unity and the methods for achieving it.« less