Oz Mate said
This book deserves 2 stars for the effort it makes in introducing XP to .NET programmers. After that introduction, it drops way south. Author takes the reader through exercises that are more of your "hello world" type. How many developers will you see earn a living writing these small kiddie programs? Author makes absolutely no efforts to familiarize the reader on how the concepts of XP can be used in their daily work.
I thought that this book will tell me how to do TDD in a business application. Getting a class to return a string and writing Unit Tests for that is lame. Of course in business applications we deal with data. But there is much more involved, database, messaging, UI, etc. No mention of any of these.
Oh yes! and the most idiotic chapter was on writing test code for UI.
Overall, it was an absolute waste of money. I got tricked by other reviews here, and bought the book. Big mistake.
I'm annoyed by the fact that this book has wasted my time, by promising to be something totally different than what it really is. I cannot give it anymore than 1 star.
W Boudville said
A book like this was inevitable. .NET is rising fast as an impressive programming environment. And Extreme Programming has garnered wide attention for several years, in writing C++ and Java code. So the book addresses a logical intersection of the two trends.
Roodyn uses simple code examples to show how you might apply XP to C#/.NET development. The code is easy enough that his messages should be clear. He also talks about the general ideas of XP. Like a systematic use of unit testing for improved robustness. Of all the features of XP, this may be its strongest and least controversial point.
You should be aware of widespread dissent in the programming community about XP. Many experienced programmers have deep reservations (to put it politely) about some features of XP and about how broadly XP can or should be applied. These qualms have nothing to do with .NET, per se. So if you are reading this book, it will certainly teach you XP. Just be wary of thinking that it is the best way to program.
Lasse Koskela said
Dr. Neil Roodyn's "eXtreme .NET" is a book aiming at showing how to apply the Extreme Programming development techniques to .NET development. The approach is very much example-driven, meaning that the book is full of examples both in the form of programming tasks and dialogs between the members of a fictional .NET development team.
Looking at the table of contents, the book would seem to cover all the essential stuff, including Refactoring, test-driven development, pair programming and testing, as well as some supporting practices such as automated builds. While I enjoyed reading Dr. Roodyn's writing and the content is quite nice a mix indeed, I am still left with this itch that I'm missing something -- I suspect that something is more discussion about the low-level techniques, tools, etc. that I'm so at home with when doing Java. It also might be that while the book focuses so much on the examples with a relatively light overview on the forces driving the practices, I'm feeling like I'm being shown the "what" and "how" but not the "why". Having said that, the examples (both user stories and development tasks as well as the code snippets) used in the book are excellent and well chosen in terms of complexity. Dr. Roodyn managed to avoid the most advanced features of the language of choice, C#, which made my life a lot easier, being new to the platform.
In summary, I wouldn't recommend this book as an introduction to Extreme Programming because it doesn't go down that road far enough. I also wouldn't recommend it as a reference or tutorial for setting up the development environment to support XP because it doesn't cover nearly enough details. I would, however, recommend it to follow up that introductory "generic" XP book a .NET developer should read first. Dr. Roodyn's description of the development process is definitely worth the effort if you're not quite sure about how test-driven development works in practice or about how those stories are broken down to tasks.
Clinton Volzke said
This book gives a fresh insight into the world of XP and it's application to techniques suitable for .NET developers.
Vote Clinty.
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