Rating: 
Summary: Simply Superb.
Review: Though I cannot claim to be an XP expert (I've only read the first one), ... It's certainly true that XP is a lean methodology which fits the environment in which we must do business. But the attitude underlying Xp is that of DO SOMETHING about it! Whether or not you work in an XP shop and either the management or the customers of the place you work at are willing to embrace XP, surely there are XP practices which any Java programmer can embrace right away? Probably the most important of these practices is writing your test cases first and building and testing frequently. This in turn will enable you to refactor and improve your code with ease. It ought to be fairly easy to get official recognition and approval of a pilot program to use this part of the XP methodology from management. The tools are freely downloadable from the web, and if you can document benefits to both development and testing from using this part it will give you ammunition with which to argue for adoption of the rest of it. This book documents the most important tools which the XP movement uses (in the J2EE space anyway). It is hands-on and unique (the closest equivalent I'm aware of is a chapter in Marinescu's "EJB Design Patterns" covering Ant and JUnit. If you believe (as I do) that hands-on application is the best way to learn then this ought to be the second 'XP' book you buy after the first one.
Rating: 
Summary: Where is the Extreme Programming connection?
Review: To me the title is somewhat misleading. The described tools *can* be used in XP projects as they can be used in any project. So the book's title seems to be an attempt to profit from the current extreme programming hype. Moreover, in the chapters about JUnit where a real connection to XP could be made, the authors do not show the XP way of developing software, i.e. developing test first or test-driven. All in all, the book is nothing more than an introduction to a bunch of development tools.
Rating: 
Summary: intro at best
Review: Very disappointed in this text. The examples do not scale to real world projects. Take a look at the petstore ant build structure before you adopt the approach suggested by Rich. Also - the examples are ridden with errors and hardcoded nonsense. The tools presented can be used in a manner more elegant than the author presents. Take the lessons with a grain of salt and refactor a process that works for you. (The text off the shelf won't work for most projects.) Plenty of good information available here if you are experienced and willing to sift through some mediocre examples.
Rating:
Summary: Somewhat misnamed, but still extremely useful
Review: You can happily ignore the main title of this book. Sure there's a nod toward extreme programming, but that's not what this book is really all about. This book is a fine introduction to a whole bunch of really useful tools to boost your Java (and especially J2EE) programming. And all the tools can be downloaded, source code and all, for free! There are too many tools to list here, but they include the best-of-breed Ant build system, JUnit, HTTPUnit, ServletUnit and Cactus test frameworks, load and performance analysers and some great libraries for interacting with other servers. Two major test cases are carried through the book to show the benefits of each approach. Each tool covered gets at least a chapter of tutorial, and some of the major ones also get an appendix of API and configuration information. This book was almost too useful to review. It's been open on my desk from almost the minute I got it and has greatly improved many aspects of my development process. If you want to get up to speed quickly and practically on a load of useful, powerful, tools - get this book. Everyone I've shown it to has wanted their own copy ...
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