The Mythical Man-Month
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.
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Re: The Mythical Man-Month
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 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".