Rating: 
Summary: Extreme Aberration
Review: This is very good book not only for cannot-stand-XP crowd as the title might suggest, but, surprisingly, also for a newcomer who wants to simply learn what XP is. The authors explain very nature of XP even better than 10 or so XP books written by its inventors. Prior to this book I have read a few XP articles and browsed through several XP-written-by-the-founders-books which time to time I saw on shelves of my local bookstore. I grasped the XP ideas - no problem - but it was some sort of mechanical memorization of main XP values/practices. I formed my doubts, but I never got it to the point where I can have a passionate discussion about it. This book changed it - now I can enthusiastically argue for XP or against XP depending on the circumstances. ...The opportunity presented itself a couple a days ago. I went for an interview with a manager who, according to my inside information, was a huge XP proponent (fanatic), but the organization wasn't quite practicing XP yet. During the interview we had a good time discussing XP benefits and the trill of working in XP environment, and after the interview I had a good laugh about it - what a fool this manager was! But most importantly he liked me and there is a high probability he will come back with a job offer, unless, of cause, he reads this review. I might even take this job - why not - this is good company after all. They are at least one or two years away from really introducing mandatory pair programming, collective code ownership and other socialistic idiocies of XP. By that time I will skip to someplace else. Or, perhaps, I might even stay. I will kiss up to that manager more, it should be easy like taking candy from a child; and when time comes I will become XP team coach - not a bad career grows opportunity! Just kidding... Back to the "Extreme Programming Refactored" book. I gave it four stars. I would give it five, if authors "refactor" the book into some 150 - 200 pages at max. I started to read from the front cover and stopped for a break only after reading 160 pages or so. "Wow, what a book! What an insight!" - I told myself. But then the "velocity" of my reading started to drop. The rest of the book did not contained really new information. The humor became less sharp and endless "songs of extremos" became a little bit annoying - I started to skip them. In the beginning of the book the authors promised to refractor XP in chapter 15. Through out the book they give a LOT of hands up about what this refactoring would look like, and as a result the long awaited chapter 15 did not contain much of a new information. After slight disappointment with chapter 15 I put the book aside and, actually, never read the conclusion (chapter 16). Still, this is very good book: not that many computer books I read in my life almost from cover to cover.
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