Al Davis's 201 Principles of Software Development

No matter the profession, the size of the cubicle or the number of stops you make, you may find a reference book you tend to take along the way. For hardware engineers it may be something like Donalds Fink’s and Donald Christiansen’s Electronics Engineers’ Handbook. For many project managers it is Fredrick Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month. In my case, I have carried Al Davis's 201 Principles of Software Development along through more than a couple of career incarnations. 

Principle 73 in 201 Principles of Software Development discusses the need for loose coupling of software components. This is a ”known unknown” that bears repeating. Services composition remains a bit of a black art, and the key to successful application integration, and it has gained new attention as Microservices architectures take over where Service Oriented Architecture left off. Read the rest - a review on Amazon.