I recommend this book to anyone involved in engineering, not just software people.

When it comes to designing complex systems, some big problems cannot be tackled by simply throwing more resources at them. That's a profound and scary observation, especially to those responsible for managing these resources.

This book has had a huge impact on the discourse you read about software engineering, particularly on the web (blogs, articles). The views expressed by Mr. Brooks have reached common acceptance in those circles. I must wonder to what extent they have percolated into the workplace however.

I suggest contrasting this book with "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond for a different perspective on large software development and scaling issues, in the open source community.

The first half of the book is a case study of the development of OS/360 in the 1970s: what the problems were, what was tried, what worked and what didn't. While I (and probably many others) snicker at the state of technology then compared to what it is now, I feel that the lessons Brooks learned (and happily relays to the reader) are still relevant and valuable. You certainly will have to abstract the methodology to the current technology we have today, but managerial lessons, as I said, are still relevant, mostly because people haven't changed that much. Basically, adding more people to already-late projects makes things worse. All of the communication and documentation that goes along with large projects are 100% necessary, and the documentation should be about 90% complete before coding starts. I think a wiki would solve both of these issues in one shot, but that's me. The last half of the book is mostly an inner dialogue by Brooks about what he thinks of the lessons he preached, what other people in the industry have said about his book, and his responses to it.

I think this is a definite must-read for anyone that programs on large software projects or manages large software projects. Brooks comes right out and says at the beginning that other engineering disciplines already know about all of the project management overhead, which I agree with, because I am in one of those other disciplines. Apparently the programming people don't see it necessary to teach project management as part of a bachelor's degree program, which might explain a lot of the larger programs in the past few decades. I have to admit though, the entire computer industry, both hardware and software, has been through a tumultuous and extraordinarily rapid history. Other disciplines have a much longer history book from which to reflect and design better processes, management or otherwise.

Finally, the prose is dry sometimes awkward, which I suppose is typical of the professor types with delusions of eloquence. Despite that, I thought it was overall an easy read, though not as humorous and engaging as some of the other software books I've been through.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. The work was first published in 1975, and republished as an anniversary edition in 1995 (ISBN 0-201-83595-9) with the essay "No Silver Bullet" and commentary by the author.

Brooks's observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had mistakenly added more workers to a project falling behind schedule. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project -- writing an Algol compiler -- would require six months--regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering" because "everybody reads it but nobody does anything about it!"

I have read this book twice now. Once in college and once again now 5 years later. While I did not get much out of it 5 years ago, now that I have been in the industry a few years, it is a VERY good re-read.

30 Years later this book is still highly relevent. If your project is in trouble, don't add bodies!