Rating: 
Summary: The right (practical) way to start up a xp java team
Review: ... I think it's hard to practice all 12 practices of the xp methodology but there are some, the more practical, that are very useful and necessary even if you don't want to make xp: the incremental test first programming, using JUnit, Cactus, HttpUnit and continuous integration, using Ant. The book is about these and more open source tools, which means that we can just download them, use them and if we can, improve them. And this is great. But open source tools often lacks in printed documetation and if you are not involved in their development it could be difficult to start using them. In this case this book is just what you need.
The first part of the book is simply great, well written (I'm italian, as you can read), there's a lot of code (you can download it from the book site). The author divided the examples in a simple example (just to start to use the tools) and in a case study, to apply the practice in a real world project. In about 240 pages you will use Ant, JUnit, HttpUnit, Cactus, JMeter, JUnitPerf, and if you are not an expert there is an intro about the j2ee deployment architecture too.
The second part isn't so useful: it's the reference for Ant tag and the api reference (about 150 pages). You would pay the same for the book wothout the reference, so consider it as a gift.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good for the breadth
Review: An excellent beginning to all the subjects it covers, this will definitely get you started. Those of us who want in depth coverage of every detail might be left a little wanting, but each of the subjects covered could easily fill a book the size of this one if covered in that detail.
Rating:
Summary: Should be titled "Introduction to Open Source Java Tools"..
Review: As other reviewers have mentioned it's not an extreme Programming book. I consider that to be a good thing because it skips the usual rhetoric that fills the pages of the XP books.
Whether you follow XP or not (I don't) it is a useful book. It covers a lot of useful and popular open source Java tools. If you are new to these tools I highly recomend this book. It will save you a the effort of wading through online documentation , going through mailing lists and generally surfing the net looking for information. If you are already comfortable with all these tools you may not find the book as useful. It's still nice to have all the information in one place though.
Rating:
Summary: A must have book
Review: Even if you don't subscribe to the XP model of programming this books covers tools that every java programmer must have. Yes the tools are open source but a developer must use the best tools no matter who makes them. I have know about these tools but have not been able to find good docs explaining where, why and how to use them, this book does. This book also covers the real world not some lab or classroom setup.
Rating:
Summary: Work smarter
Review: Extreme Programming (XP), a methodology developed by Kent Beck and Eric Gamma, has joined CASE/UML as a core practice in professional software development. The central tools for XP (JUnit, Ant, Cactus, JMeter, HttpUnit) are now covered in a practical reference by Richard Hightower that explains how these open source tools should be integrated into a project to achieve XP's benefits.The book follows the construction of an online pet store--similar to Sun's J2EE Blueprint Pet Store but instead of focusing on J2EE technologies, Hightower's example illustrates how XP tools are integrated into a project. The tuturials work through several iterations of the pet store. The baseline version has no connection pooling and no EJBs. It has several JSPs, a few classes that use JDBC, and some tables in a database. The second iteration of the case changes the content management piece of the system to a container managed persistence (CMP) entity bean that implements the backend product management. This iteration demonstrates how to incorporate EJB deployment into Web applications and how to ensure that the unit testing of the category systems still works after the addition of CMP entity bean support. The third iteration of the case study uses an EJB stateless session bean to add pooling of connections and prepared statements. This iteration is used to demonstrate JUnitPerf and show the time savings from pooling prepared statements when the site is hit by many users. The fourth iteration of the case study creates a Catalog TagLib. Cactus is used to test this TagLib. This is an excellent example to learn how to operate and run Cactus tests and how to integrate them into the build/deploy process. The fifth iteration of the case study refactors JSPs using the Apache Struts project. Then, it uses HttpUnit to test that the application still works. The HttpUnit test is run against the baseline and new version to show that the requirements are still met. The sixth and final iteration of the case study refactors the Web application to use Exstensible Style Language Transformation (XSLT) instead of JSP to build the catalog view. It then compares the throughput of the two approaches using JMeter. I've found it very difficult to follow the partially finished documentation for many of the useful open source tools needed for full XP. Having a book like Hightower's is invaluable to fully leverage the benefits of the XP movement in mid to large scale development efforts.
Rating: 
Summary: A blend of XP and Open Source Tools
Review: Good for those who'd like to find out an intro level information on XP and Open source tools, such as Ant, JUnit, Cactus, HttpUnit, JMeter, JPerf. What I don't like is Part III of the book, is a really [bad]. It contains references to ANT Tasks, and API reference for the open source library (150 pages). This is a deadly sin that I hate most in a book, besides it's not easy to carry the additional 150 pages around.
Rating:
Summary: Finally. One book that brings it all together. . .
Review: Great stuff. I think most people see how powerful these tools are but rarely end up taking full advantage of that power. I know that before buying this book I stuggled with the daunting task of: 1. Downloading and tinkering with each tool.
2. Surfing all over web reading little bits of documentation and examples that exist for each tool.
3. Trying to make sense of how they work together to streamline
the process of rapidly designing, building, testing and deploying high quality scalable web applications and services. .... Obviously many people have been waiting for one book to help them to get the big picture that this book offers. As such it is one of the most valuable contributions to the development community that I have seen in a long time. Can't wait for the second edition.
Rating:
Summary: Good overview of important tools
Review: Having used JUnit and Cactus on previous development projects, I was looking forward to getting this book in order to gaining some additional insights into these and other toolsets. While there are sections that aren't as deep as I might have liked, overall the book is a good introduction to some very important tools for the Java J2EE developer. This book is a great introduction, and presents underlying concepts well.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: I bought this book hoping for a quick jumpstart to getting a simple xdoclet/struts app up and running.
The example code from the "Building Struts Apps with Ant and XDoclet" is so bad, it's a disgrace. I spent more time figuring out why their code wasn't even close to working, than I would have if I had just skipped their book altogether. It couldn't work, it never worked, and it shouldn't have been published.
Rating:
Summary: Not for developers!
Review: I don't usually write reviews. The only reason I am doing it here is that I don't want people to make the same mistake I did with this book. I read the reviews here and bought the book. I was disappointed! I feel that this book was written to exploit the Open Source and Extreme Programming buzz words. Each chapter was shalow on the topic and in some occassion confusing. I eventually went to the tools' website and read from there. Perhaps this book would be a good book for general purpose. I would not recommended for *developers*.
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