Brooks Jr. comes from an older caste of writers on software that are romantic and pepper their texts with aphorisms and paintings. It’s thoroughly enjoyable, Brooks Jr. comes across as an artisanal craftsman rather than a hard-hat wearing supervisor.
On the surface level the book has failed to stand the test of time for example we know software teams should not be organised in the style of surgical teams with a hierarch. In other cases he is clear where his prescriptions were wrong, in the 20th anniversary edition he lays out a whole chapter detailing how Parnas was right with information hiding.
What I was most surprised is at how the author has GPT’d himself. He goes into great care to summarise his views. Surely classics are classics because there is some intangible gain to reading them in the detail that they exist, we have never been able to summarise classics because the whole meaning behind them is implicit in the writing. Brooks Jr. seems to have failed to grasp the entire magic and draw of his long-lasting work.