"The Software Project Survival Guide" contains a lot of templates and check-lists to impress your manager if you need to. For real-world project planning, you have to see if your project size matches with the intentions of the author (from the intro to "The Software Project Survival Guide": "The plan has been designed with project team sizes of 3 to 25 team members and schedules of 3 to 18 months in mind. These are considered to be medium-sized projects.").

If find the book valuable, but not a "must have", and on the whole much less important to the single programmer than "Code Complete".

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com