Book Reviews

Commencing from this issue, MWM will be running a book review page. The books we will be reviewing are M books, Software Engineering and Computer Science books plus Web related books. We will not be reviewing other programming languages unless these integrate with M. We encourage our readers to send us their reviews.

The Mythical Man-Month
(20th Anniversary Issue)
by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Who would purchase a 25 year old computing book? With so much evolvement in this field, one would expect such a book to be of interest only to the historian. Well actually this book still sells well and proof of this is the reissue of the book with practically the same content as the 1975 first print plus 4 new chapters.

The reason for it remaining current are that:

1. Professor Brooks, recounts first-hand his experiences as a project manager on the development of the IBM OS/360. Few people will ever be involved in such large scale project.

2. The writings are humble and there is no God-like, I know it all style. Factual reporting of errors (sometimes costly ones) are factually told so that the reader could learn from them.

3. The book is written as a series of short yet informative essays. They are easy to understand and follow.

Some of the material is outdated (for example, interactive systems were at the time starting to gain ground and main memory greater than 1MB was something awesome) but still one can easily fast forward most of the descriptions to today's' times. While the IBM OS/360 project was a huge one, Brooks also analyses small projects and forwards his thought on how large projects and small ones differ.

I don't know whether I would have enjoyed the book as much had I just come out fresh from collage. Matching my own experiences of software projects with those in The Mythical Man-Month was most enjoyable even though I couldn't always agree with the arguments put forward. Without injuring my ego (one of the nice things when reading a book) there were times when the tips forwarded were better then my own and I have adopted them. For example, one particular claim I made in an MWM commentary was about the use of GOTO statements. Brooks points out that there are programmers who go to great lengths so that this instruction is not used. He asks if this is enviable.

Conclusion: This is a good and enjoyable book to read.

E&OE