Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. Get it used cheap. But you might not get the humor until you've worked on a few failed projects.
The beauty of the book is the copyright year.
Probably the most profound takeaway "law" presented in the book:
The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.
The idea being that there are failing parts in any given piece of software that are masked by failures in other parts or by validations in other parts. See a real-world example at the Therac-25 radiation machine, whose software flaws were masked by hardware failsafes. When the hardware failsafes were removed, the software race condition that had gone undetected all those years resulted in the machine killing 3 people.
