That book hasn’t aged as well, but it had some parts that are still quite relevant, today.
I always thought that Rapid Development was better than Code Complete.
I’ve probably read all of McConnell’s stuff (and I’ve taken a lot of Construx courses). At one time, I was quite the fanboi.
A lot of folks around here don’t seem to like him, which I find odd.
I would assume the author just hadn't had much exposure to those ideas so they weren't even considered for inclusion. (Besides, they tend to not be researched so actively because they don't leave as many paper trails.)
Other than that gripe, though, I learned a lot from it!
Construx eventually developed a curriculum around a fairly “corporate-friendly” version of Scrum, that I never found that appealing.
The way I write code, these days, makes Agile look like Orthodox religion.
However, it’s highly dependent upon me, being who I am, and a lifetime of habit and personal process. It would probably not scale well.
McConnell has always been about introducing process, metrics, and rigor to software development. I don’t think he’d be thrilled with the way I do stuff.
WFM. YMMV.
"Agile Development" (under that name, at least) didn't really appear on the scene til nearly the end of the decade
Precursors to it were there (spiral development, pair programming, etc) ... but kinda hard to write about something that didn't exist yet :)
Code Complete is the "Introductory Level" and Rapid Development is the "Practitioner Level".