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Title: Extreme Programming Applied: Playing to Win by Ken Auer, Roy Miller ISBN: 0-201-61640-8 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $36.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (8 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: The most practical book among all the XP books
Comment: This is the most practical book among all the XP books ever published. You do only need to read Kent Beck's XP manifesto "Extreme Programming Explaining" before studying this book. Then you may skip all other books from the "Extreme Programming Series" and start to interpret written material about individual XP practices:

- Design Improvement: " Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code " by Martin Fowler;
- Test-Driven Development: "Test Driven Development: By Example " by Kent Beck;
- Sustainable Pace: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco;
- Pair Programming: "Pair Programming Illuminated" by Laurie Williams and Robert Kessler;
- Whole Team: "Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn;
- Planning Game: "Planning Extreme Programming" by Kent Beck, Martin Fowler;
- Small Releases: "Software Project Survival Guide" by Steve C McConnell.

This book covers most of the XP practices at a glance, but with sufficient level of details. It tells in practice:

- How to introduce XP, how to overcome managers' and developers' resistance, how to set the right attitude (Part One);
- How to remember XP core values, how to handle exceptions if something has broken, e.g. the customer won't write stories or the number of developers is odd, how to do pair programming or stand-up meetings, how to steer and how to plan the whole project and the individual iterations, how to write tests, to create the pair-friendly space, how to refactor, and how to reduce the risk (Part Two);
- How do design the simple, what collective ownership means, how to automate acceptance tests and not get distracted by the code, why the overtime is not the answer and how to coach and keep the score (Part Three);
-How to "sell XP" (commercial aspects of XP projects, e.g. how to bill the customer), how to "scale XP", and how to "measure XP" (Part Four).

Enough said, this is the most practical book among all the XP books ever published.

Rating: 5
Summary: Good way to get started with XP!
Comment: As a complete newcomer to XP I bought this book based on the review by Peter Lindberg (see below) and I agree with his comments.

Some parts of the book assume that you know a little about XP at the start and you have to wait for a fuller description further on in the text to gain understanding. I didn't find this too much of an issue but you may want to buy one other introductory XP book to help.

I enjoyed the authors writing style and liked the use of guest experts in reinforcing the methodology.

Well worth the cost as you only need to buy this book and perhaps one other to get the XP story.

Rating: 3
Summary: Good XP Book, but is redundant and overpriced.
Comment: If you are interesting in Extreme Programming or need to evaluate it, I recommend this book. It is a very readable book but does have some drawbacks:

1. It is way overpriced. Too thin, not enough info for [price], even if Amazon discounts it. Ideas are repeated over and over again.

2. These authors (and others who review their buddies' books on Amazon and give biased reviews) are making a living off you buying into XP. It is funny how they say the last thing you want to do is adopt XP only partially.

3. So don't waste your money on more than one book from this group of XP diciples who are rehashing the same info over and over in about a dozen different books.

4. You can adopt only some of the principles provided in XP without adopting the whole practice. I've seen it done successfully in many places. These principles existed before XP and they can exist without it.

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