The mention of Lakos' book "Large-Scale C++ Software Design" reminds me of the epiphany I had when I read it. You could almost boil the entire book (and it's not a small one) down to "eliminate circular dependencies". That's trite, but Lakos walks through all the problems that large C++ projects had and lays out how all of them boil down to the dependency problem. Particularly interesting to me, at the time, was his analysis of how compile times got exponentially longer as interdependencies grew, to the point where even a small change required recompiling the entire code base.

The section in Lakos on how to identify and remove circular dependencies was worth the price of the book.