A lot of people just don't like the author, so viscerally react negatively to the book itself. As a book in and of itself, it's a bit opinionated and maybe a little outdated, but no more so than The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man-Month, Code Complete, Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, Refactoring and Code (I haven't read the other two books in OP's Software Engineering section, so can't speak to them). It's entertaining to read and something you could finish on a long plane ride - there's good advice in there, but you won't really learn anything like you would if you read, say, Knuth.