Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing!
Review: First perusal implied this might be a fun read. The book is certainly chatty and easy to read - very much like reading your young nephew's diary (not that I've read my nephew's diary, but you get my drift!). And that's its biggest problem - the rather juvenile "enthusiastic" style soon pales when you realise how low the "signal to noise" ratio of the content is. It seems ironic that this is part of a series Microsoft are calling "Microsoft Professional" when it seems so... well amateur! What you're paying for here is effectively the diary of someone completely new to .Net starting to write code (an XML text editor) without so much as a basic training course, documenting every tedious little thing he learns as he learns it. The author tries to convince us he is the customer, the designer, the trainer, the developer... and occasionally he consults his friend because after all Extreme Programming talks about developers working in pairs, but it all comes across as very Mickey Mouse and incredibly naive. If you've just taught yourself C# as your first programming language this "diary of a .Net newbie applying extreme programming methodologies" might be a fun read, but if you're an "enterprise developer" I suspect you're going to be pretty disappointed at how "amateur" the development project is and at how tedious the documenting of every little code change becomes when it goes on for page after page after page.This may be an unfair review because it's written without having finished the book. I'm afraid that by Chapter 10 I'd realised that life's too short to spend time on so much "noise" for so little "signal". It seems odd to have released this title at about the same time as its "companion" series book "Object Thinking" as they are as alike as chalk and cheese ("Object Thinking" is a far better book for the enterprise developer in my view, albeit one with shock! horror! no code in it).
Rating: 
Summary: Online Content
Review: I am the author, so I'm rating the book three, not because that's what I think it is, but because it's in the middle. I'll see whether I can get a comment added as author or otherwise update the page when Amazon gets back to me. It appears that the online content isn't what at least one reader wanted it to be. It's chronological by date, so that readers can follow along which files changed as we went forward, and it sounds like at least one reader wanted the final version. My mistake: I wasn't expecting that. I'm not sure why -- the point of the book is to follow along on how we develop, not really to provide a handy-dandy XML editor -- but if this reader or any other wants a final snapshot of the files, they should email me at ronjeffries at acm dot org and I'll gladly send them along. And I'll see whether we can add another batch of files to the online content. Thanks for the feedback.
Rating:
Summary: wordy
Review: I bought the book for 3 reasons:
- C# (I was a VB.NET developer)
- eXtreme programming
- Unit Testing Only Unit Testing did fulfill my expectations. The book itself doesn't read easy. It contains a lot of text without telling much. I think the book could be reduced to 250 pages without loosing the strength of it. The references in the book and some chapters were interesting.
They inspired me to test some new ideas. The author knows his profession without any doubt, but I didn't get used to the way he wrote this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Great book about how to think about programming
Review: I learned to program back in the dark ages before books came with CDs or websites where you could download the author's code. Back then, if you wanted the author's code, you typed it in from the book. I typed in the code from many wonderful books and I learned to code that way. As I typed, I was paying attention to the code, not just mindlessly hitting the keys. While this taught me what a great programmer's code looked like when it was done, it didn't teach me how that programmer arrived at the solution that was in the book. What I always wanted was to see the author's thought process as he arrived at the finished code presented in the book. With Ron Jeffries' "Extreme Programming Adventures in C#" I finally have that opportunity to watch over the shoulder of a great programmer and watch not only his code but, more importantly, how he thinks. I love that the author is willing to show his dead ends and false starts. And then how he recovers from them. The book is really language agnostic. It's in C# but the lessons are more about programming and thinking about programming than about a specific language. I highly recommend this to all programmers, not just C# programmers.
Rating:
Summary: Very Frustrating Inputting the Code
Review: I want to start out by first saying that the topic is wonderful. Since I'm not currently working I thought I would actually put the code in and really learn these new techniques. To my dismay, the code is riddled with problems. So don't expect the code to work. I've made it to chapter 7 and I'm extremely frustrated. I end up having to flip through the book to find other references to a method to see if it might help solve the compilation problems. This would all be fine, but the author has stated that he expected readers to put the code in as we went. That's why he didn't provide the final files. Here are some examples of what I'm talking about: 1. page 31: image It's showing a menu. No menu has been created. 2. page 44: XMLKeyDownHandler method. Refers to textbox. It should be txtbox. (occurs 4 times) 3. page 45: First line of code. It's wrong. It is right in Chapter 5 but it doesn't work here. 4. page 46: same as #2. 5. page 63: Code won't compile. InsertControlPText is crashing. I decide just to comment it out. 6. page 63: Code won't compile. Problem in NewSelectionStart. I decided to move on because I see it's getting reworked later. 7. page 67: current code sample.
a. InsertControlPText has appeared but with no code.
b. LineContainingCursor has changes that were never talked about.
c. Appearance of Enter() method (find out why in Ch. 6)
d. Appearance of TestText method (what is it?)
e. Appearance of TestLineContainingCursorDirectly method 8. At the end of chapter 5 I still have two NUnit tests that are failing and I'm not exactly sure if they should be failing or not. What I am very surpised about is that Microsoft would publish a book with so many mistakes in it. I'm also surprised they would allow references and links to restaurants (see page 76). The theory is wonderful. I will finish the book but I'm going to stop trying to type in the code. It's just taking to long to work through the bugs in the book.
Rating: 
Summary: This is a good book, which makes it's point
Review: I've just read many of these review and can side with only a few of them. People who read this book to learn C# will be disapointed. Also people who read this book for a manifesto on XP/agile will be upset. But, if you read this book, looking for insight into a programmer's mind and how to develop good code and recover from unexpected (often self inflicted) problems, then this book is for you. I know C# pretty well, and I had the pleasure of reading David West's book before Ron's, but I must say that I think Ron did an excellent job. Proving his point -- that simple design, test driven development, and plenty of refactoring without expensive and time consuming up-front planning will work and work well. I learned alot. The only reason I gave it a 4, as opposed to a 5 -- and I would have loved to give it a 4.5, was because I thought there were a couple of chapters that could have been thorough, plus the author would sometimes go off and do some things and then clue you in by and oblique reference or say, "I was testing this yesterday yada yada". I would have liked to know up front what was done since the rest of the book was like a project diary. In all fairness, I suspect Ron left it out because it didn't add much value, but I want the whole picture when I'm involved in something. He could have provided a small sidebar that essentially said..."while you were out" and explained anything that had to do with the project that wasn't in the text. This would have been helpful. I would also have liked to see actual work times documented. In other words, how much time did it take to get story one done complete with Programmer Tests and Customer Tests, etc. It would be great if he chose to be more granular than that -- like how much time coding, testing, and planning, but that might be too much of a burden.
I'd highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: This is a good book, which makes it's point
Review: I've just read many of these review and can side with only a few of them. People who read this book to learn C# will be disapointed. Also people who read this book for a manifesto on XP/agile will be upset. But, if you read this book, looking for insight into a programmer's mind and how to develop good code and recover from unexpected (often self inflicted) problems, then this book is for you. I know C# pretty well, and I had the pleasure of reading David West's book before Ron's, but I must say that I think Ron did an excellent job. Proving his point -- that simple design, test driven development, and plenty of refactoring without expensive and time consuming up-front planning will work and work well. I learned alot. The only reason I gave it a 4, as opposed to a 5 -- and I would have loved to give it a 4.5, was because I thought there were a couple of chapters that could have been thorough, plus the author would sometimes go off and do some things and then clue you in by and oblique reference or say, "I was testing this yesterday yada yada". I would have liked to know up front what was done since the rest of the book was like a project diary. In all fairness, I suspect Ron left it out because it didn't add much value, but I want the whole picture when I'm involved in something. He could have provided a small sidebar that essentially said..."while you were out" and explained anything that had to do with the project that wasn't in the text. This would have been helpful. I would also have liked to see actual work times documented. In other words, how much time did it take to get story one done complete with Programmer Tests and Customer Tests, etc. It would be great if he chose to be more granular than that -- like how much time coding, testing, and planning, but that might be too much of a burden.
I'd highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book!
Review: If you want to learn C#, don't buy this book. If you want to become a better programmer, this book can probably be of considerable help to you. This book is about Extreme Programming. The only way it can be really shown how XP works is of course in practice. In my opinion Ron Jeffries has succeeded in coming very close to letting the reader be an observer of a real XP project. You get a good feeling for how things should be done, what to avoid, etc. We know some of those things already, of course, because there's no black magic involved, but Jeffreys at the very least makes us more conscious of them. After having read this book, I've become convinced that all those people who are shouting on top of their lungs that XP is just a fancy name for something very shallow, are probably wrong and that they should at least give it a serious try before condemning it.
Rating: 
Summary: Extreme Programming Misadventures in C#
Review: In spirit, the book covers Extreme Programming, but please don't expect the code to hold up. I would say if you want to learn C#, don't write a book to do it. Why should I pay Mr. Jeffries to learn the language (and it is evident that he did not learn it well), and get the same old comments about Extreme Programming that other books have given me?
I did find it comical that he states that he likes to keep things simple but when it comes to Xml, he would rather write an Xml parser / validator himself than to use what the platform provides. I guess the next thing we will see now that we have the editor, is a new operating system built from the ground up to prove that we need the editor :).
Save your money and buy another book in the series, and Ron... you owe each of us $50 for teaching you C#, but I will take $25 since you didn't seem to get a lot out of it.
Rating:
Summary: Extreme Programming Misadventures in C#
Review: In spirit, the book covers Extreme Programming, but please don't expect the code to hold up. I would say if you want to learn C#, don't write a book to do it. Why should I pay Mr. Jeffries to learn the language (and it is evident that he did not learn it well), and get the same old comments about Extreme Programming that other books have given me?
I did find it comical that he states that he likes to keep things simple but when it comes to Xml, he would rather write an Xml parser / validator himself than to use what the platform provides. I guess the next thing we will see now that we have the editor, is a new operating system built from the ground up to prove that we need the editor :).
Save your money and buy another book in the series, and Ron... you owe each of us $50 for teaching you C#, but I will take $25 since you didn't seem to get a lot out of it.
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