DeMarco, Tom. Why Does Software Cost So Much? New York: Dorset House, 1995. The title essay contains an insightful investigation into the topic of software costs. DeMarco is as eloquent as ever, and he places himself squarely on the side of sensible, effective, developer-oriented development practices.

DeMarco, Tom, and Timothy Lister. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. New York: Dorset House, 1987. Several sections of this book contain energetic attacks against unrealistically ambitious software schedules, and the whole book provides moral support for anyone who's feeling too much pressure.

Maguire, Steve. Debugging the Development Process. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 1994. Chapter 5, "Scheduling Madness," discusses how to make a schedule aggressive but not damagingly aggressive, and Chapter 8, "That Sinking Feeling," explores the problems associated with excessive overtime.

Gilb, Tom. Principles of Software Engineering Management. Wokingham, England: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Gilb provides practical advice for working with bosses and customers to align expectations with reality. The book includes a nice chapter on "Deadline pressure: how to beat it."

Costello, Scott H. "Software engineering under deadline pressure." ACM Sigsoft Software Engineering Notes, 9:5 October 1984, pp. 15–19. This is an insightful peek into the many effects that schedule pressure has on good software-engineering practices. Costello has a keen sense of the pressures that developers feel and how they respond to them, and he advances a three-pronged solution that managers can use to counteract the damaging effects of deadline pressure.

Fisher, Roger, and William Ury. Getting to Yes. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Although it's not about software, this is one of the most valuable 154-page books you're likely to read. The book arose from work conducted by the Harvard Negotiation Project. Unlike some negotiation books that consist mainly of tricks for beating the other side, this book focuses on win-win negotiating and lays out the method of Chapter 29. It describes how to counter negotiating tricks without stooping to the use of tricks yourself.

Iansiti, Marco. "Microsoft Corporation: Office Business Unit." Harvard Business School Case Study 9-691-033, revised May 31, 1994, Boston: Harvard Business School, 1994. This is a fascinating study of the development of Word for Windows 1.0.