If there is one thing that computer books are most definitely not usually praised for, it is their visuals. Thankfully, books about user experience and user interface design are usually, indeed, worthy of such acclaim. In this case, however, limiting a review to such criteria would be short-sighted, poor, and unjust. The truth is that most important literature works are multi-layered, profound, and suitable for multiple relectures.

This month, the methodology issue, is a good opportunity to take a look across a whole swathe of my bookshelf and deal with it all at once. The important point to bear in mind is that methodology is about the approach you take to building software. That means how you decide what to build, plan it out, design it, implement it, test it, deploy it, document it, and manage (and even pay for) all of that. The 1990s was the decade when object-oriented techniques hit the mainstream: it was also the time of the methodology wars.

Robert L. Glass wrote a book in 1998 called "Software 2020", currently rated with only one star… by the author himself. In his review (written in 2017) he justifies this abysmal record because of a simple observation: none of the predictions in the book turned out to become a reality.

Yes, you read that correctly. Microsoft. Writing on information security. They may be the software company who have done the most writing on information security, including many security software companies.