I would love to hear some reviews of this. This is the first time I’m hearing about this book, but it looks like the exact kind of thing I’ve wanted for a long time.
It's hard to see how even the most expert contributors and skilled editors could compress a whole industry of knowledge that much and end up with something useful. Inevitably, much of the specific knowledge presented in the Guide is simplified to the point of arguably being wrong, dated to the point of arguably being obsolete, or just missing the point altogether.
As someone else pointed out, this is only a "guide to" the field of software engineering. It does cite additional references as well (details in appendix C), though there are only 36 references supporting the entire Guide and some of them are old and of debatable relevance to modern software development. This edition of the Guide is nearly a decade old now, so it obviously doesn't include references to good books that have been published more recently and adopt a more objective, evidence-led style when discussing which modern practices actually work that was sorely lacking in most books from a decade or two ago.
In particular, it feels like it targets that stage of problem solving where I've defined my problem and am looking for prior art, but am having a trouble searching simply because I don't know what the people who previously met this problem called it.
For this particular step of problem solving a very broad, very shallow general outline of the whole field, or even just a glossary of terms that tries to cover the whole field, feels like just the tool for the job.
I don't see anything wrong with that book. It is covering very broad scope and maybe if you would want to know why building software is complex and you don't have any knowledge in the topic that would be a good starting point.
Like if you would be an owner of a gym chain and because of current situation you would like to start software company. This could give you an idea why it is not just having "an app idea" and why those pesky developers demand so much money.
I like this part in the book:
Most people are limited in their ability to hold complex structures and information in their working memories, especially over long peri- ods of time. This proves to be a major factor influencing how people convey intent to com- puters and leads to one of the strongest drives in software construction: minimizing complex- ity. The need to reduce complexity applies to essentially every aspect of software construction and is particularly critical to testing of software constructions.