Books I recommend to my software engineering students

> [The Mythical Man-Month] Key takeaway: You'll soon fall victim to the problems identified by this book, even after reading it.

Yeah, that pretty much describes all of software development in one stroke. But you should read it anyway (if only to experience the feeling of someone predicting your future before (most of) you were born).

I've advocated for a "canon" of books for software engineering and computer science that could be taught in school. The canon would accomplish several goals: it'd inform students about the less technical but profoundly important ideas within CS (Brooks' No Silver Bullet, The 10x cost incurred when moving from stage to stage in waterfall, how to treat and manage failure, etc.), it'd teach students how to think about problems (How To Solve It by Polya, The Design Of Everyday Things), and it'd provide history/culture (Coders At Work, Soul of A New Machine). One should, of course, learn how to program in a CS major. But there's diminishing returns on teaching programming in a class; ultimately students must make the shift from learning in class to teaching themselves. Perhaps teaching more of the "soft" aspects of CS would give better returns, especially as the students move up the ranks and start managing people.

I've always like the MMM but there is also an undercurrent of this being a re-telling of xeno's paradox, and its important to remember the rabbit actually does win.

So, adding new bodies does incur cost, but the belief that always adding new bodies always adds more cost than adds impetus to the outcome is not always true.

The classic example is "the hump" which was the cost in fuel terms to ship fuel to China, to be able to fly from China to bomb Japan. Economically ruinous, people forget that missions were nonetheless successfully conducted: it was ruinous but the outcome was achieved within limits.

So the MMM does not say "never add a body" it says "know what your incurring in overhead, choosing to add a body"

ECS systems are great, but claiming they are the only option available is more than a tad unreasonable.

Clean Coder is great for developers just starting their career.