The Mythical Mythical Man-Month.

This book is definitely dated, and I bet that's one of the sources of my frustration for it.

Another is its romantic outlook. It starts by telling you, the programmer, why you love programming, because apparently the author knows. And what he says is how programming is pure thought put into action, just like God's word created the World. I bet I'm misquoting, but it doesn't matter much.

Later on, the author talks about phenomena that he has noticed in the process of making computer systems, and I keep feeling that it's all just romantic assumption that the author probably correctly observed in many cases and then, as it happens, liked and instinctively felt the need to generalize them and saw them in everything. Perhaps they exist and I'm talking crap, but it feels a lot like faith.

I do see why the book was so valuable and popular, though. It introduces a way to think about software production that specifically takes into account the innate characteristics of it, and it's differences to other engineering fields. That is brilliant and visionary, and I liked it.

I didn't read through the whole book, and I never will. I think whatever good principles exist there have been filtered into the programming discipline, and I don't have much to gain. I also think that even some fallacious or romantic principles have also seeped into our culture, and I don't want to read about those.