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This is a good introductory book on XP by one of its originators. This book will not exactly show you how to XP but it will rather walk you through the ideas and the philosophy of XP. The writting of the book is quite simple, yet it describes well the principles of XP and how they work together. As we have already seen the ideas behind XP are simple and rather old (but maybe abandoned); in this book one can see how useful they can be if put under a well-organized scheme. On the positive side, the book is generic as it shows no preference towards specific platforms or languages. Can be (and should be) read by managers and developers, though the content could have been better organized to pass the message along better to different readers. I liked the fact that he is realistic when at the end of the book he discuss about potential obstacles in implementing XP and its limitations. If one goes through the book, or actually any introductory book on XP, he/she will realizes that the difficulty with XP is not learning the concepts but applying them succesfully in your everyday work. This you will not get it by reading ``extreme Programming explained''. Again, this book gives a great high-level view of XP, but it will not make you an XP programmer at the end of it (I assume that this was not the intention of the author). Summarizing, the book does a great job explaining what XP is about. I think that any team of developers working together can gain big by reading this book, no matter if they decide to apply XP (or some of its techniques) for their project or not. Related materials and sites:
Reviewed by Demetrios Demopoulos, 01/31/2002 |