Thursday, June 29, 2006

Book Review: Extreme Programming Pocket Guide

Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, by "chromatic". O'Reilly Books, 2003. 90-ish pages of pocket-sized XP love.

I've had my nose stuck to the grindstone working on the book James and I are writing, but badly needed a bit of time away doing something else, so I pulled this tiny work off the stack of review books (now 30 books high) and blasted through it in a short hour.

It’s short, sweet, to the point, also injected with the occasional XP Dogma Line such as if you don’t implement all 12 practices then you’re not doing XP and your manhood will shrivel or your womb will be barren.  I get tired of that line, but the rest of the book is truely golden.

It’s concise and lays out great sections on why one should consider XP, roles in XP, artifiacts, and a few others.  The real wealth is the section on XP practices where the 12 tenets are laid out in concise, reasonable fashion.  These practices are clear and understandable without a bunch of mystical handwaving or badly-written example scenarios I’ve suffered through in a couple other XP books.  (Roodyn’s Extreme .NET comes to mind as a painful example of that.)

The book’s conciseness and focus makes it a perfect tool if you’re trying to sell XP to your management, team, or co-workers.

(Standard Book Review Disclaimer)

 

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