Rating: 
Summary: Buy this Book Only if you want to look Good at Work
Review: Let's face it. We are only going to buy something if we get really useful technical knowledge for work or it helps us look good at work. This book does both. With this book you will learn these open source tools quickly. Open Source may be free, but it comes with a high cost of reading badly written documentation if any does exist.
This will save you time going straight to learning the tools. Once you know these tools this will hopefully save you time at work. The real value is when you tell your boss how effective these tools are and that they are free. It is a win-win situation learning open source tools and this book makes it easier.
I look forward to a follow up to this book, since there are even more open source tools that are out there now.
Rating:
Summary: Buy this Book Only if you want to look Good at Work
Review: Let's face it. We are only going to buy something if we get really useful technical knowledge for work or it helps us look good at work. This book does both. With this book you will learn these open source tools quickly. Open Source may be free, but it comes with a high cost of reading badly written documentation if any does exist.
This will save you time going straight to learning the tools. Once you know these tools this will hopefully save you time at work. The real value is when you tell your boss how effective these tools are and that they are free. It is a win-win situation learning open source tools and this book makes it easier.
I look forward to a follow up to this book, since there are even more open source tools that are out there now.
Rating:
Summary: A Key Guide to Java Open Source Tools
Review: Looking for how to use Java OS Tools for your application development. Look no further than this book. This has now become an invaluable guide at my desk.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed... (1 major issue)
Review: Note... I've edited my original review. My initial reaction has been assuaged somewhat over time... this book has been a useful tool for me regarding Ant and JUnit.The choice of having the examples targetted toward SQL Server was QUITE disappointing. If you go by the title "Mastering Open Source Tools..." one can only be disappointed when the database of choice for all of the examples is SQL Server. To quote the authors "primarily it is what a large number of developers use." -- then why state that the book is about Open Source tools? True, this is not intended to be a database book, but the examples are there for a reason and I think it is a safe assumption to state that if the reader is buying a book about Open Source tools, they would expect to use Open Source tools for the examples. I wasn't disappointed that this book did not go into detail about XP... other texts are better locations for this information. It would be a much better text if the examples were targetted toward an Open Source DB (MySQL, PostgreSQL). I would; however, highly recommend this text if you have SQL Server at your disposal to utilize the extensive (and worthwhile) examples.
Rating:
Summary: a solid start for beginners
Review: Seriously, I can't find any other book right now that lays Maven out in such an easy to approach way. All the material online is reference based entirely and my fingers are practically bleeding from digging through google every five seconds. If you've never setup Maven before, buy this book while you still have your hair.
Rating:
Summary: a solid start for beginners
Review: Seriously, I can't find any other book right now that lays Maven out in such an easy to approach way. All the material online is reference based entirely and my fingers are practically bleeding from digging through google every five seconds. If you've never setup Maven before, buy this book while you still have your hair.
Rating:
Summary: A must-have
Review: The software testing stuff was great, and the material on continuous integration is best I've read. Overall, a great reference. This book is going to stay next to my workstation.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a Book on Extreme Programming
Review: The title is extremely misleading. This is not a book on extreme programming - if you purchase this book looking for insightful information on XP; you will be disapointed. This book is mainly about the open source development tools Ant, JUnit, and Cactus. The information provided is brief at best. It would have been better if the authors focused on fewer tools and gave more indepth materials. The book includes API descriptions for most of the tools discussed - this consumes about a third of the book. I am not the biggest fan of have API description in books, unless it is explicitly a reference book. In summary, if you are looking for further, quick overview, information on the OS development tools like ANT and JUnit; then this book is for you. If you are looking for meaningful information on extreme programming only; avoid this book like the plague, the information covered is cursory at best. It is a pity the title is misleading.
Rating:
Summary: Great reference!
Review: This a must-have reference for anyone seriously interested in XP and its application in the software industry. I found a lot of really good examples of how to do continous integration and automate testing. Most of the technologies covered are pretty new and have the big bonus of being open source! All in all, XP and Java are a very robust combination and this book is doing a good job of showing it.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for Ant, JUnit and Cactus -- Not an XP tutorial
Review: This book describes the techniques for implementing the eXtreme Programming (XP) practices of automated testing and integration under the auspices of XP. This book is not meant as XP tutorial even though the book includes a good introduction to eXtreme Programming and the practices that make up XP. For the uninitiated, eXtreme Programming (XP) is a pragmatic approach to software development that emphasizes results first and takes an incremental, 'build something that works quick' approach to building the product, using continual testing and refactoring. Kent Beck came up with the idea and has written several books on XP and he emphasizes testing and writing test code to validate the actual code you are writing. Beck calls Extreme Programming a "lightweight methodology" that challenges traditional notions of software development process. The basic idea is to start small and building something real that works and move forward while constantly refactoring the code. I bought the book as a reference guide for Ant and Cactus and found this book to be really well written, easy to read and a great resource even if you don't use XP as your software development practice. One of the reasons I love this book is because of all the examples and code included in this book. The authors and contributors take real examples and apply Ant, Cactus, JUnit, etc in terms of those real problems making it easy to take the lessons learned and applying them to your projects. I really like the flow of the book - For example, the chapters on Ant begin with some basic information about Ant, what is it, and how to build your xml file to use Ant. You use Ant on a simple example and then move to more complex tasks where you eventually end up building an entire ear file using Ant. The chapters on JUnit and Cactus are also excellent and are written in the similar tutorial fashion. I haven't spent a lot of time looking at the HttpUnit, and JMeter chapters. Another nice feature of the book is that it includes all of the API and tag references for Ant, Cactus, JUnit, and HttpUnit that takes up over 150 pages. In most cases, I find it annoying when authors pad their books with 100's of pages of API, but I didn't mind it in this case as it's nice to have them available for easy reference.
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