Rating: 
Summary: Actually Doing XP? Here's an OK reference
Review: "Extreme Programming Installed" provides information on the practice of extreme programming in your organization. It's meant for those already using XP, rather than a casual reader wanting to get more insight. The confusing writing style and layout of the book make it a difficult cover-to-cover read.The content is useful, but the chapters are not tied together well, skipping from one topic to another seemingly at random. This causes a great deal of confusion on the part of a reader intent on reading the book sequentially. The detail level varies wildly, from excellent 50,000 foot overviews of concepts, to confusing minute by minute minutia of detailed work. The extremely conversational stream of consciousness tone and constant cross references muddy the points the authors making -- the reader's too busy trying to figure out what they are trying to say. This is a useful reference guide to groups who have already begun to implement extreme programming, but I cannot recommend it to those who want to learn more about this exciting lightweight methodology.
Rating: 
Summary: Best yet
Review: CLearly written and a better into that XP Explained if you are trying to get to where you can use the process
Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: Extreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology. This is no ivory tower, academic exercise; the authors have used XP on large-scale projects and seen it work. This book is an introduction to XP for programmers. Chapters tend to be short and easily digested. The language is somewhat casual. XP advocates unit testing and code review. Okay, what's so extreme about that? Unit tests are fundamental to the process. Tests are frequently written before the code to be tested. There should be a test for anything that could possibly break. Tests are run frequently and must run at 100% before integrating code. Note that refactoring (see Martin Fowler's "Refactoring") is an XP practice and is sensible only where there is an extensive collection of tests. Code review takes the form of pair programming. That is, two programmers sitting side-by-side, one driving and the other paying close attention to the task at hand. So, it's continuous code review. Some of the other practices are simple design, coding standard, continuous integration, small releases and forty-hour week. All of the practices are directed toward simple, quality code with the highest business value (as determined by the customer) written against milestone deadlines that become increasingly accurately gauged. I highly recommend this book. I would expect other experienced programmers to react as I do that XP makes good sense. It may be difficult to sell, but it is worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: I just got XP installed into me.
Review: For someone who has only heard of XP before reading the book, I reckon that the book has done a great job explaining the concepts of XP and helping me internalize them. It is for the programmer who wants to be better. The book is highly readable. The book list at the end of the book is indispensable too.
Rating:
Summary: The best of the serie
Review: From a practical stanpoint, this book takes you step by step into the implementation of XP. Follow it step by step and you'll have an "XP development process". In my opinion, it is best to start with XP explained, followed by XP Installed, and then XP Planning.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful whether you do XP or not
Review: I am writing a new review. I mentioned, in my previous review, that I am acknowledged in the credits as having contributed, but I don't think I wrote a clear review. In a nutshell, this is one of the few programming books I keep right next to my keyboard for sound advice on Unit Testing and a variety of software construction, even though the company I am at does not do full XP (yet). The book assumes you have bought the concepts in "Extreme Programming Explained." While that is a great book, it is theory and one is still left with "Well, how do I do it?" This book shows you step by step. One of the problems I had in the previous book and on the Web, was understanding User Stories and User Story Estimation. This book leads you through the process. One of the wonderful things about Extreme Programming is that it is a lightweight, yet rigorous process. In this day of huge process like CMM and ISO9000, which most programmers totally reject, XP is light enough and common sense enough to be adopted. In fact, many of the pratcices in this book are totally useful even if you have not totally adopted XP. Example: At my current company, we need to add Unit Tests fast. This book gave me the step by step procedures to do just that. The book covers in detail all the XP practices with examples. One of the only downfalls of the book is that a lot of the examples are in Smalltalk, a language that the authors favor, but few use. I had a hard time with the examples, however I finally understood them, and there is a Java section. Overall, XP is a revolution in software development and this book is the guide!
Rating: 
Summary: A step in the right direction, but there are better books
Review: I had hoped this book would give practical development techniques for XP theory as presented in Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained. Unfortunately, this book takes a step in that direction and then veers sharply off the path. There are some good ideas and new concepts here, but everything is so vague you have to fill in a lot of gaps to arrive at anything useful. Also, I have to say, the tone of the book is so smug and self-congratulatory at times that it really turned me off. I found Rick Hightower's Java Tools for Extreme Programming offered much more useful XP coding advice. Mr. Hightower's book explains how to use open source tools Ant, JUnit, Cactus, JUnitPerf, and others. He explains where each tool fits into the XP methodology, and gives buildfiles, complete tests, and techniques for using the tools together to build an XP software development process. This book helped me put the XP methodology into practice. If your a Java programmer, my advice is to forget Extreme Programming Installed, and pick up Java Tools for Extreme Programming.
Rating:
Summary: Good practice but can managers give up?
Review: I have programmed in projects from "Cowboy style" to "User case and big document styles". Until now, XP introduced a real good practice to us. However, good practice doesn't mean people will use it. For example, in "user case and big documents approach", managers become manager and business analysors and they produce a lot of documents. In one project, 70% project time has spent on documents of so called "detailed user cases", which are a strange mixture of requirement and scenarios. Managers and business analysors were busy while programmers has little to do at these 70% project time. If XP is used, what can managers and business analysors do? They can only do "use cases" and cannot write codes or draw dynamic diagrams. But they have the say. Do you think they will use XP? The politics could finally decide what to use. And managers certainly like "big document approach". Those documents will not be used in coding at all.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, but not a practical tutorial
Review: I just love this book. However, I don't give it a 5 because it's a bit too verbose. I recommend it for people who want to get excited about XP - or to get someone else excited, which has worked for me. For that - making you *want* to use the methodology - it's great. But it is less than perfect to put you on track to actually do it. I've been told (second-hand, haven't actually read them) that if you want a practical guide you should get either the green book (for managers) or the orange book (for developers). (Check ...(this website) list of related books on this page to find them)
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and Quick Reading...
Review: I'm a member of a development team totaling 4. So some of the book wasn't very useful because it talked of larger teams but many of it's principles can still be applied to my team. I especailly found useful the chapters and information on estimating deadlines and reaching those deadlines. I also picked up a lot of things along the way that were helpful. Although I'm not completely convinced of switching the book was worth the tips I picked up for increasing the accuracy of my estimated time-to-completions as well as programming tips.
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