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Summary: IMPROVE CLIENT-DEVELOPER RELATIONS
Review: Even for those of us unfamiliar with the "Extreme Programming" series, this text provides easily understood and implementable practices for improving client-developer relations.Coming from a content/project management background in the e-learning industry, I found the authors' iterative methodology and willingness to include client input and feedback regularly and at all stages of the project, very refreshing. Too often clients and developers take adversarial roles in the development of projects, each attempting to dominate the other in what should ideally be a productive partnership. This text identifies the causes of this often dysfunctional relationship and offers practical solutions to prevent and correct these problems. The result is that both parties can focus their energies and attention on what is truly important, the successful completion of the project.
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Summary: It's about time!
Review: I am a programmer. I don't write Java or C# or Perl or any server side code. I am the guy that works on the interface side of web sites doing very complicated XML and XSL. This is the first book on programming that understands my role on web projects and that pure software development methodologies don't take my needs into account. The clear online of roles and how team members can work together to create powerful websites given by this book is great. I also really liked the chapters describing how to use XML and XSL to separate content from presentation. It has given the sites I work on far more fluid structures. Hats off to Wallace, Aufgang and Raggett.
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Summary: Good reading for new XP web teams... could be better
Review: I didn't get a lot out of the first half of this book. Part one tries to look at the basic principles and practices of XP from the perspective of a web team. Some of the material was a rehash of that found in other, better XP books such as the original, Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck, or Extreme Programming Installed. The material that was new was not all that informative and I found that I disagreed with some of it. Part two had some painful parts as well, but the whole thing started to turn around for me in chapter 8 which discusses the graphic design process from the perspective of XP core values. This chapter is excellent and worth the price of the book, although I wish it was longer. I gladly would have bought an entire book which the same premise as chapter 8. It would have been nice to see a more explicit breakdown of XP core values as they relate to the graphic design process. Part three of the book discusses XML and XSLT as an alternative to classic web page architecture that allows for greater seperation of concerns and thus facilitates test-driven development. This is all well and good, but there are other good books on the subject, and there are an awful lot of alternatives approaches available (As a J2EE developer Apache Struts and Apache Cocoon both come to mind.) This section also could have been expanded into an entire book twice the size of this one which talked more explicitly about core XP values and practices and how XML/XSLT facilitated them. It would also be nice to see a comparison of one or more alternatives such as Apache Struts and/or .NET. The fourth and final section of the book discusses XP practices and how these can be adjusted to a web project. Again, I didn't get an awful lot out of this. It was not clear that the deviation from standard XP practice was necessarily an improvement or that it was caused by the inherent nature of web projects so much as the inexperience of the development team relative to XP.
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Summary: A great primer on how sites should be built.
Review: I have been developing web sites for years and was very glad to come across the xml architectures described in this book. Unlike traditional attempts this is the first true separation of content and layout that I've come across. Few developers are putting XML to use across the entire web development practice. It makes sense, it is simple to implement and it reduce our costs. Well done.
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Summary: Just a list of problems with no solution
Review: I read about the first 1/3 of the book and found that it does list the problems encounted in web project ( general software project) but unfortunately I failed to found practical solutions for these problem in this part of the book. I guess the remaining part won't be much better. So I decided to gave up reading.
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Summary: Good if you are just starting an XP Web Project
Review: I would recommend this book for anyone who is NEW to XP and is starting a web project. The authors do a good job of explaining the XP process in the context of web development, but you should always start with the "white" book, _Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change_ by Beck. However, as an experienced XPer, I did not find anything new in this book from an XP point of view and a lot of the tweaks to XP that the authors discuss, we also did on my XP web development project.
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Summary: A very useful book - I recommend it to anyone
Review: I'm not a programmer but I work in the heart of a web team. This book brings balance to the process of creating websites and harmonizes the often confusing roles of programmers, graphic designers and the rest of the web team. Well done. I particularly liked the graphical design process and how they have taken a very difficult process and turned it into an easy to follow and organic experience. This book has defiantly made me a better professional.
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Summary: Extreme Hubris for Web Prophets
Review: Save yourself [$] and visit... to learn more about the principles behind Agile Software Development, and to download free articles about the process. Perhaps 6 or 7 years ago Web Projects were important, but nowadays the 'web' represents just the presentation layer on top of a much deeper stream of systems architecture and design (incorporating information systems delivery of sales, order capture/entry, provisioning, billing and customer service solutions to the enterprise). Thus this book treats Web Development as some kind of sidebar singularity, rather than an incorporated element of a larger approach. As such it represents a very novice entry into a broader directive trying to understand and adopt process principles to facilitate change and respond to unpredictable events.
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Summary: Learn the new ways of web site development.
Review: This book is for both professional web-site development companies and for the customers who would like to order web-site development from a contractor. The book offers new way of developing web projects. The mode of operation is based on the famous methodology called "Extreme Programming" (XP). Until publication of this book, all of the non-compilation books on XP have come from those who were involved in its birth. This publication is the first title from the "second generation" of XP practitioners. This book is self-essential. However, if you would like to know more about economic and spiritual aspects of XP, digest the "Extreme Programming Explained" by Kent Beck. Another valuable resource is "Testing Extreme Programming" by Lisa Crispin & Tip House. It exhibits valuable web testing strategies. While the authors mostly rely on XP manifesto, they have adjusted the methodology to best fit their own needs. For example, they offer so-called zero-iteration, which sets up the framework, but have no business value to the customer. The parents of XP discourage this approach in "Extreme Programming Installed" by Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson and Chet Hendrickson. Who are right? You decide.
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Summary: Biting off more than they can chew
Review: To get straight to the point, I was disappointed with this book. The book opens with great promise on how XP is going to change our world and revolutionize programming projects for the web. However, Wallace, Raggett, and Aufgang end up trying to bite off more than they could chew in a 150-page book. First, the authors assume you already know a great deal about extreme programming, which I did not prior to picking up this book. To their credit, they do refer you to Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explored, recommending you to peruse it before reading their book. Unfortunately, this reference occurs in the Preface, and could easily be missed by readers who go straight to Chapter 1. Without this background, it's not hard to get lost - for example, the authors refer to CRC's without explaining what the acronym is or what it means - I had to check the index; indeed, CRC's are discussed (albeit briefly) much later in the book. Not to say that there aren't positives - I enjoyed Part II, the discussion of how to integrate XP practices into a development shop. But, the authors just do not go into enough detail, and leave me wanting more. You feel that this book could have either been a 20-page paper or a 500-page book, but not something in between. A 20-page paper would have simply highlighted the differences between XP development for non-web projects versus web projects. A 500-page book would have gone into detail on a number of concepts discussed in this book. But, this slimmer volume goes in between these two choices, and ends up not really doing an adequate job of either highlighting the differences or going into a good amount of detail about XP practices. Part III, a discussion of XML, was an awkward insertion into the text. The book goes from general management discussion to highly technical without warning, and you ask yourself within a few pages, "What the heck just happened here?" One minute they're talking about the importance of comfy chairs, and the next they're discussing recursive nested structures. It left my head spinning, and I'm not a technical wallflower. It almost seems like the authors had a 120-page book, thought it was too slim, and had to stuff an extra 30 pages in somehow. This book whetted my appetite, and I'm now interested in learning more. Maybe I'll take the authors' advice and read Kent Beck's book to get the detailed information I'm looking for, but did not get from Extreme Programming for Web Projects.
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