The Mythical Man-Month

Thu, 03/06/2008 - 6:42pm

Lighthouse on the beach. One of the most famous books in my profession is The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. I've read chapters from it during my study and loved those, but I never read the entire book.

I bought a soft cover version of the book on Amazon this week. It turns out Mr. Brooks is a professor at the university in Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina.

The first chapter starts with an image of a prehistorical tar pit, as well as a Dutch proverb: "Een schip op het strand is een baken in zee.", translated to: "A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea."

As if through some sort of mysterious father-son connection, Jaap did a blog post about a slight variation on this Dutch proverb today.

Comments

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

Permalink Submitted by Rolf on Fri, 03/07/2008 - 5:08am

The Mythical Man-Month is a really good book, I've bought it last year. It's a set of essays, and the new print has an extra essay I haven't read yet. I'm not much of a reader, but I'm slowly getting to the end of the book.

Nice things about Mythical Man-Month:

It's a set of relatively short, well written essays so you can read through it essay-by-essay in your own time
It describes software building as it is today, but it was written over 30 years ago
It contains really good observations about behaviour of developers in general, and the consequences of putting them in a big team.

It's funy and scary at the same time to be shouting "You are right" while reading through the book, whilst realizing he was right 30 years ago, and people (developers) haven't changed much since.

The Dutch proverb "Een ezel in het algemeen, stoot zich niet aan dezelfde steen"(*) does not hold for big-ego, stubborn developers I guess.

(*) "A donkey doesn't bump into the same rock twice".

Guus Bosman

software engineering director

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