Extreme Programming for Web Projects

Rating:
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.

Rating:
Summary: Saved my Project
Review: We have been working on our company Intranet for months. We have been doing lots of diagrams and a lot of meetings but getting no place. This book got us moving and we are just finishing Iteration Two and we have real deliverables to show for it. This book makes real business sence.