Cover drawing: C. R. Knight, Mural of the La Brea Tar Pits. Courtesy of the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The essay entitled, No Silver Bullet, is from Information Processing 1986, the Proceedings of the IFIP Tenth World Computing Conference, edited by H.-J. Kugler, 1986, pages 1069–1076. Reprinted with the kind permission of IFIP and Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. (Frederick Phillips)
     The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering / 
   Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. — Anniversary ed.
       p. cm.
     Includes bibliographical references and index.
     ISBN 0-201-83595-9
     1. Software engineering. I. Title.
   QA76.758.B75 1995
   005.1’068—dc20                           94-36653
                                                                   CIP

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Copyright © 1995 by Addison-Wesley Longman, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher and author.

ISBN 0-201-83595-9

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley Crawfordsville in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

Printing 35th January 2010