fred brooks

fred brooks wrote some books about how to design software. i read them in college and refer to them all the time, even though management doesn't listen, which is one of the things fred wrote about.

his book was written in the early 1970s about the development of an IBM mainframe OS. amazingly, not only are his lessons still relevant, they may be more relevant now than they were back then, if only because in the 40 intervening years, people haven't listened to his lessons much at all.

in addition to telling us how to develop software, fred makes a compelling explanation of why we write software.

i could not have said it better myself.