The first time I read The Mythical Man Month, I found the book utterly boring, a waste of my time, and thought it was written by some management guru that never wrote a line of code.

A few years later, I realized Fred Brooks won the Turing award. Some years after that, after a few large development projects, I started understanding what he was talking about.

Are there any other books about software development on a meta/philosophical level—not in the sense of design patterns, templates, or even lisp macros—but at a level where ideas are expressed without code?