Short Review: Practices of an Agile Developer

UPDATE:  Once again, I prove my abiltiy to goof up:  The title of this book is Practices of an Agile Developer, not Programmer as I'd earlier noted. Fixed in the title and text. Sorry!

I got Practices of an Agile Developer not long ago and ended up reading it bit by bit over a week or two.  It’s a very short, concise book (176 pages!) with a lot of great stuff in it.  It’s absolutely worth picking up if you’re at all interested in learning about agile, moving to agile, or improving your existing agile approach.

Here’s the short review I posted up on Amazon.com:

This is an absolutely terrific book. It's well-written and lays out 45 essential practices for starting and keeping an agile project rolling.

Each chapter starts out with a very sensible overview, pointing out where the practices for that chapter might fit. Each specific practice is nicely done, with short, to-the-point discussions of what the practice is, how you roll in to it, and how you stay in the groove with that practice.

There's a lot of goodness in the bibliography for additional reading, plus the epilogue, "Moving To Agility" is worth pasting on the foreheads of stubborn mangement who are unwilling to listen to rationale for improving the development environment. The specific steps for rescuing a failing project are terrific, as are the other epilogue sections.

Lastly, there's a nice pull-out reference card with one or two sentance blurbs on each practice.

Sheer gold.

Well worth the asking price. (Disclaimer: I got this for free as a review book.)  This one gets saved on my bookshelf, unlike many other fine reference-style books which arrive in the mail.  Those get read, reviewed, and passed on to other folks simply because they’re not unique enough for me to keep around.