Review

Target Audience: Developers, Team Leads, Managers
Difficulty: Beginner - Intermediate

Who should buy this book?

Buy this book, if you are using .NET and are new to extreme programming. If you know extreme programming and are interested in knowing what tools and techniques can be used to bring XP Practices to .NET projects and teams, then this is a perfect book for you.

Review Summary:

An excellent introduction to extreme programming in the realm of .NET. Dr. Neil does a very good job of explaining extreme programming in a very simplistic way along with plenty of scenarios and dialogues to outline to concept. Really worth a buy for anyone interested in extreme programming and working with the .NET Framework. This book gives a very quick and nice overview of what extreme programming is, and how we can implement it in our .NET development teams.

Pros:

Presented in clear and enjoyable manner
Lots of hands-on and mock ups to outline the concept
Describes how to use NUnit and NAnt to implement XP Practices in .NET projects.
A full step by step project utilizing all XP Practices learnt
Cons:

A chapter on Continuous Integration would have been nice.
TOC at Glance

0. Setup.
1. eXtreme Programming Overview.
2. Pair Programming.
3. How to Solve Big Problems.
4. Test-Driven Development.
5. Refactoring.
6. Spiking.
7. Automating the Build Process.
8. More Testing.
9. Step-by-Step Development.
Appendix I. Guideline Solutions for Task Breakdown Exercises in Chapter 3.
Appendix II. Building Your Own Simple Test Framework with Excel
Appendix III. Recommended Reading.