Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
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This point of view has been a strong influence upon my career, the pursuit of conceptual integrity underpins much of my work. The anniversary edition of this book is the one to get, because it also includes his even-more influential 1986 essay “No Silver Bullet”.
A bliki entry on Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month and the lesson of conceptual integrity.
Executive coach for product leaders; previously a product partner at GV and a product manager at Google.
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If you could only read one computer science book, this would be it. Almost fifty years old, it’s as relevant as ever. I promise you’ll nod your head as Brooks skewers mistakes that engineering leaders continue to make to this day.
From “Best Books for Product Managers [2026]”, his standing list, introduced as “the 44 books I’d consider essential to any PM’s bookshelf”. Marked TOP PICK on the page. Every book links through amzn.to and a Bookshop.org affiliate id (/a/83161/).
Software engineer working on distributed systems and databases; creator of the rqlite distributed SQLite database.
loved
The amazing thing about The Mythical Man Month is that it doesn't feel dated, even though it was first published in 1975. Instead it simply feels like a group of programmers discussing the very same challenges the industry has today, with just different technology in use.
A post written after colleagues asked him which programming books had shaped him most.
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology; author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
recommended
First, Refactoring, Domain-Driven Design, and the Pragmatic Programmer are all classics for a reason. Amazing books, and mandatory reads. Working Effectively with Legacy Code deserves all its praise, and of course everyone (yes, really) should check out the Mythical Man-Month.
A post naming the pre-2015 programming books that changed how he thinks about code, plus his take on the usual classics.
Computer performance engineer; author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools.
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The Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks (Addison-Wesley, 1995/1975)
His Books page, which he introduces as a list of textbook recommendations — explicitly not everything he owns, only what he would recommend. Last updated 24-May-2025. The Amazon links on the page carry an affiliate tag.
Software developer and writer; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, author of the Coding Horror blog.
recommended
I challenge any developer to pick up a copy of The Mythical Man Month and not find this tale of a long-defunct OS, and the long-defunct team that developed it, startlingly relevant.
His long-running "Recommended Reading for Developers" list, last updated September 2025.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
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