The Mythical Man-Month

Fifty years old, and the essay on conceptual integrity has aged into the most useful thing in it: a system is better for being the product of one coherent idea than for being the sum of many good ones.

That argument is why the item page — the one you are on right now — is a single renderer driven by each collection's declared metadata, rather than a Book page, a Tool page, a Station page and four more that would agree on the day they were written and drift ever after.

Four stars: the staffing chapters are a historical document, and the book is often recommended for the part that has dated worst.