

New Book by Fred Brooks - The Design of Design - blackswan
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201362988

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renkeyes
In case you're curious, the Table of Contents are listed below:

Copyright

About the Author

Preface

Part I: Models of Designing

Chapter 1. The Design Question

Chapter 2. How Engineers Think of Design -- The Rational Model

Chapter 3. What's Wrong with This Model?

Chapter 4. Requirements, Sin, and Contracts

Chapter 5. What Are Better Design Process Models?

Part II: Collaboration and Telecollaboration

Chapter 6. Collaboration in Design

Chapter 7. Telecollaboration

Part III: Design Perspectives

Chapter 8. Rationalism versus Empiricism in Design

Chapter 9. User Models -- Better Wrong than Vague

Chapter 10. Inches, Ounces, Bits, Dollars -- The Budgeted Resource

Chapter 11. Constraints Are Friends

Chapter 12. Esthetics and Style in Technical Design

Chapter 13. Exemplars in Design

Chapter 14. How Expert Designers Go Wrong

Chapter 15. The Divorce of Design

Chapter 16. Representing Designs' Trajectories and Rationales: In
collaboration with Sharif Razzaque

Part IV: A Computer Scientist's Dream System for Designing Houses

Chapter 17. A Computer Scientist's Dream System for Designing Houses -- Mind
to Machine

Chapter 18. A Computer Scientist's Dream System for Designing Houses --
Machine to Mind

Part V: Great Designers

Chapter 19. Great Designs Come from Great Designers: Not from Great Design
Processes

Chapter 20. Where Do Great Designers Come From?

Part VI: Trips through Design Spaces: Case Studies

Chapter 21. Case Study: Beach House "View/360"

Chapter 22. Case Study: House Wing Addition

Chapter 23. Case Study: Kitchen Remodeling

Chapter 24. Case Study: System/360 Architecture

Chapter 25. Case Study: IBM Operating System/360

Chapter 26. Case Study: Book Design of Computer Architecture: Concepts and
Evolution

Chapter 27. Case Study: A Joint Computer Center Organization: Triangle
Universities Computation Center

Chapter 28. Recommended Reading

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

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megaduck
I'm eagerly awaiting my copy. Brooks' previous work, 'The Mythical Man-Month',
is _still_ one of the best books ever written about building software. I re-
read it every few years, just to keep those lessons fresh.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, Brooks was the manager of
IBM's huge OS/360 project in the 60s. The system eventually shipped, but it
was massively overbudget and late. He took the lessons he learned from the
debacle, and wrote 'Mythical Man-Month' in 1975.

It's shocking how many of his insights still apply: Adding people slows down
projects. Keep teams tight, and structured around your most productive
programmers. It often pays to think deeply about a problem before you tackle
it. Don't overbuild.

It's true that dynamic programming languages, tools like git, and rapid
prototyping have made some of his examples feel dated. However, the underlying
principles are still solid.

Hopefully 'The Design of Design' is a similar goldmine. Even if it's only half
as good as MMM, it's still earned a slot on my bookshelf.

~~~
jerf
"For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, ..."

... buy it already. Except for occasional references to kilobytes of RAM (what
the heck are those? are they like gigabytes?), you'd think the book was
written last week.

~~~
hga
Hey, cache is the new RAM, RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape. So all
though 256KB L1 caches still mean something....

------
jluxenberg
Fred Brooks, for those who don't know, is the author of the software
engineering book The Mythical Man Month (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month> )

~~~
hga
Also the author of "No Silver Bullet":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet>

I haven't read anything of his that wasn't worth reading and the MMM is still
one of the very best.

~~~
cubicle67
No Silver Bullet is one of the essays in The Mythical Man Month book

~~~
hga
It was added to the 20th anniversary edition; I read it in the April 1987
issue of _IEEE Computer_ with the wonderfully Gothic cover.

~~~
cubicle67
Thanks. I own the 20th anniversary edition and while I knew it had some extra
content, including an update to the No Silver Bullet essay, I didn't realise
NSB wasn't part of the original edition.

~~~
hga
You're welcome.

I found it very much worth buying the new MMM edition for his revisiting the
"plan to throw one away, because you will" discussion on prototyping (e.g. see
Joel's discussion on this). Very useful to me since I'd by then experienced
most of the possible outcomes of this question.

He's not one to rest on his laurels and is to be commended for turning an
_epic_ disaster into a lifetime of suggesting to us with style and verve how
we might manage to avoid such ourselves.

