Rating: 
Summary: Definitely a must-have
Review: This is the second(or was it the third?) book in the XP series. If you are a manager, try to decide whether to use XP, try the "XP Explained" book instead. This book is for people who buy the concept of XP, and wants to know how to implement it in their workplace. But this book is definitely beneficial to anyone, as they are applicable everyday, even if you are not practising XP. While books like "The Unified Software Development Process" left me in a complete daze, XP Installed leads me step by step on how to go about doing XP. An good example would be getting "User Stories"(comparable to Use Case), XP Installed teaches you what a "User Story" is, and how to go about writing one. This book is again, of the correct size, easy for carrying around. The authors wrote the book in a concise, no-nonsense matter. There's never a case of you seeing merry-go-rounds :) Unlike other books, this book was previously released to the XP community for reading, feedback and suggestions. The result of it, is a better XP book minus all the flaws which could have been left undetected. This book is a must-have for your bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Extreme Success
Review: We have a small team of four developers. We have had the rare opportunity to develop our process and our web application (using Apple's WebObjects) from the ground up. We chose XP, were guided by this book primarily, used jUnit for testing, COCOMO for long-range estimation, and it looks like we're meeting with extreme success. We'll beat the COCOMO model with default parameters. In only a month, we were able to hit the ground running with the streamlined, clear XP process. For small teams such as ours, XP is guaranteed to enable you to outpace other teams with less mature processes and also those with more process overhead. XP Installed delivers.
Rating:
Summary: Best Commercial Practices . . .
Review: What do you want me to say? This book is but one of a series. It is not a panacea for all your ills. It only talks about developing quality software when you're under the gun. My colleagues agree that these guys put together the best commerical practices of the past 20 years into one adaptive methodology. The cool thing about this is that you don't have to impliment the thing en todo to get the results you want. Find what you like and start there. Overall I found this book a delightful read. The chapters are short, like XP's iteration cycle. Short is sweet when you're an over-worked programmer like me. At first I was underwhelmed by this approach, but it works! The annotated bibliography in the back of this book (and others in this series) helps understand the author better and give you context. This book offers practical advice.
Rating:
Summary: Solid book with great XP coverage
Review: Words cannot express how good a book this is. At the beginning of the book, the spirit of the XP Practices is conveyed well. In the middle, the mechanics of how to do XP is well covered. Near the end, valuable insights are shared.
Rating: 
Summary: GOOD
Review: XP is a nice fresh way of looking at the software development process and this book explains XP concisely and clearly. You may or may not agree to -all- of the principles they advocate, but if you have any interest in your work at all, you will find parts of this gripping. Especially the emphasis on unit tests and the test-first programming idea. And so useful in practice too! Anyone involved with making software, or indeed anyone else who is interested in increasing the quality of what you're working on whatever it is, should read this! So better borrow it from your neighbour (reading once is sufficient, no need to own this book).
| 
