Rating: 
Summary: Private lessons from a master
Review: It's a pleasure to watch a master at work. It's human nature to enjoy identifying with experts, whether you're picking up tips or just validating your own experiences. If you're a golfer, you probably love to watch golf on TV. If you (as I do) build furniture in your spare time, you'd love Fine Woodworking magazine. And if you are (as I am) a developer using the Extreme Programming methodology, you'll love this book.In "Extreme Programming Adventures in C#", XP guru Ron Jeffries lets you pull up a chair next to him as he takes a small programming project from concept to delivery. Along the way, Ron learns the C# language, pair programs with several partners, makes mistakes, hurts his arm, and writes clean, well-factored code. In short, he acts like a real programmer with a real life that you'll be able to identify with easily. You'll see Test-Driven Design in practice, and watch as a complete customer-test tool is developed as an organic part of the project. The most amazing thing about this book is that Ron checks his ego at the door. He doesn't try to hide his mistakes, but instead celebrates them as learning opportunities. The review at the end of each chapter examines what went wrong and what went right. This book validated many of my own experiences in using the XP methodology. If you're interested in how XP and TDD work in the real world, buy it now.
Rating:
Summary: Private lessons from a master
Review: It's a pleasure to watch a master at work. It's human nature to enjoy identifying with experts, whether you're picking up tips or just validating your own experiences. If you're a golfer, you probably love to watch golf on TV. If you (as I do) build furniture in your spare time, you'd love Fine Woodworking magazine. And if you are (as I am) a developer using the Extreme Programming methodology, you'll love this book. In "Extreme Programming Adventures in C#", XP guru Ron Jeffries lets you pull up a chair next to him as he takes a small programming project from concept to delivery. Along the way, Ron learns the C# language, pair programs with several partners, makes mistakes, hurts his arm, and writes clean, well-factored code. In short, he acts like a real programmer with a real life that you'll be able to identify with easily. You'll see Test-Driven Design in practice, and watch as a complete customer-test tool is developed as an organic part of the project. The most amazing thing about this book is that Ron checks his ego at the door. He doesn't try to hide his mistakes, but instead celebrates them as learning opportunities. The review at the end of each chapter examines what went wrong and what went right. This book validated many of my own experiences in using the XP methodology. If you're interested in how XP and TDD work in the real world, buy it now.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy this book!
Review: Ron Jeffries often provides the line "I'm giving the best advice I have.
You get to decide if it's true for you." as a signature for his many newsgroup posts. And the same is true for this book. Ron is giving you the very best advice he can based
on his experience as a both a programmer and advocate of XP. I would describe this book as "quietly looking over Ron's shoulder" and is about as close
to getting inside Ron's head as you're probably going to get without actually working along
side him. I did not find this to be a specific "learn C#" book and I suspect that if that is what you
are wanting that you may be disappointed. If your are new to C# you may need a C# reference
book or two close at hand. I did find it to be a good book illustrating "how to learn C#",
or in fact how to approach learning any new language. I actually work in Java and so applied the principles to a Java application instead. Another thing I liked about this book is that Ron makes mistakes! And he left them in print!
And although he may come to regret that later :-) it is of tremendous value to the reader.
All too often programming books show code going from A to B to C and the reader is left to
guess what lead the author to take the direction that they did. With this book you get to
closely follow Ron's thought processes and see the results. You sometimes see the results
refactored, and sometimes refactored again. But you are never at a loss to wonder "why he
did that" or "how did we just get to here from there". One of the key techniques used in XP is Test Driven Design and of the examples used in books
so far I have found it somewhat difficult to get a feel for how the practitioner applied their
"design sense". In most cases this is because the book is focussing on the technique alone. What I really got out of this book was how Ron uses his sense of design coupled with the
techniques of XP (as they applied to this development situation). A great read!
Rating:
Summary: How to Learn while Producing Useful Features
Review: Ron provides the reader with a unique experience: pair program (albeit, silently) with one of the pioneers of extreme programming. For better or worse, the reader gets to watch Ron stumble (with tiny little steps) through developing a Windows application with an unfamiliar language. I would not recommend this book to someone who has not already bought in to test-driven development and refactoring. Ron's narratives are quite verbose (which I enjoyed) and unless you already believe in how he is working, it might require a good portion of patience to wait for him to deliver his discoveries. If you are someone who has tasted the power of simple design, iterative development, and refactoring, this book will deepen your understanding of these practices. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to see how Ron operates, it helped me better understand my own programming styles and habits.
Rating:
Summary: How to Learn while Producing Useful Features
Review: Ron provides the reader with a unique experience: pair program (albeit, silently) with one of the pioneers of extreme programming. For better or worse, the reader gets to watch Ron stumble (with tiny little steps) through developing a Windows application with an unfamiliar language. I would not recommend this book to someone who has not already bought in to test-driven development and refactoring. Ron's narratives are quite verbose (which I enjoyed) and unless you already believe in how he is working, it might require a good portion of patience to wait for him to deliver his discoveries. If you are someone who has tasted the power of simple design, iterative development, and refactoring, this book will deepen your understanding of these practices. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to see how Ron operates, it helped me better understand my own programming styles and habits.
Rating: 
Summary: Very engaging and useful
Review: Ron's intention with this book is to show that iterative and incremental software development works. And that it works especially well on projects where requirements are evolving and/or the technical or even the business domain is new to the people doing the work. He refers to this way of working throughout the book. However, I think probably the only thing that I sort of disliked about the book is how profusely he apologizes for this seemingly simplistic, risky way of programming without any Big-Design-Up-Front. That irritation is likely due to the fact that I also consider this a very good way of creating software so it gets a little tiresome reading those same apologies over and over. The book is written in a very conversational style that makes it an easy read and even though it kills a lot more trees I found it good that the code gets repeated throughout as it morphs into being. The writing is quite good and the way he tells his story is very captivating. One is able to feel frustrated, relieved, gloomy and victorious along with Ron because he makes you feel that this is your project too and almost as if you have a say in its implementation. Ron has a lot of good advice to offer and he drops numerous great tips that any programmer would benefit from reading. These tips concern general design of software, programming techniques, planning, learning, estimating and listening to yourself and the code. On the whole I feel a better software developer for reading it and I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable and informative (from the XP perspective)
Review: This is a quality book that took a bit of getting used to. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I read a lot of boring and straightforward trade publications and this was a bit different. Ron does a good job explaining the XP methodology while picking up the basics of the C# language. Initially, I was a bit frustrated as I have been using C# for years; however, the book picks up after the first quarter and becomes genuinely interesting -- a phrase I do not often use in regards to technical publications. Areas I found particularly useful included: Unit Testing, nUnit, refactoring and XP in general. I would recommend this book to anyone who has some experience with C# but is new to extreme programming.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable and informative (from the XP perspective)
Review: This is a quality book that took a bit of getting used to. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I read a lot of boring and straightforward trade publications and this was a bit different. Ron does a good job explaining the XP methodology while picking up the basics of the C# language. Initially, I was a bit frustrated as I have been using C# for years; however, the book picks up after the first quarter and becomes genuinely interesting -- a phrase I do not often use in regards to technical publications. Areas I found particularly useful included: Unit Testing, nUnit, refactoring and XP in general. I would recommend this book to anyone who has some experience with C# but is new to extreme programming.
Rating:
Summary: and I'll try to even things out
Review: This is an excellent book - it does what I believe it was intended to do. The walk-through of a full project using the test driven approach is a very unique insight into this practice. You can read methodology books for weeks - but this book actually shows you how to apply the methodology. It gets a little terse at times, but is otherwise a technical book you can actually - read - and get lots out of. It's definately not a reference, but that's not the intention. It's also not built to provide source code to an XML Editor, it's designed to show you how the code was built over a lengthy amount of time to arrive at an XML Editor. These reviews should be on the content and intended goals of the book. Good job, Mr. Jeffries
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