Essential Skills for Agile Development [Paperback]

Ka Iok Tong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 2004

Agile Development, in particular, eXtreme Programming (XP), has been gaining a lot of momentum because it can effectively address the problems plaguing software development. In 2002, we, the Macau Productivity and Technology Center (CPTTM), started to hold courses on XP and OO design to teach the skills in agile development. At the beginning, we hired a well known software training and consulting company to teach. While the instructor was very professional and instructive and the feedbacks from the students were very good, the students didn't acquire the skills taught. We knew that it was because the concepts involved were abstract and it needed far more exercises for the students to practice in order to acquire the skills. Therefore, we decided to develop our enhanced training materials. In particular, we selected only 20% of the skills in agile development that deliver 80% of the value, while ignoring those useful but non-essential skills. Then we explained these skills in terms of examples and added a lot of real world examples as exercises. After adopting this set of materials, the new students really acquired the skills taught. Now we have organized the training materials into a book: Essential Skills for Agile Development. This book covers the essential skills in: OO design, Test Driven Development (TDD), team development, planning, communication and pair programming.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Definitely a book written by a genuine programming expert for fellow programmers who want to escape from mundane programming. -- Brian Iu Ion Tong, member of the Science and Technology Council of the Macao SAR Government.

I am pretty impressed of the first three chapters. I will recommend it to my students and my project members. -- Rachid Buamar, Institute of Computer Science III, University of Bonn, Germany.

I've read some book about XP. When I read this book, I know I find the right one. -- E-Surfer

It offers some very good advice to those that want to learn more about the skills necessary for agile development. -- Steve Eichert

This book learns any developer how to apply the skills in Agile Development. Recommended reading for any software developer! -- David Boschmans, Project Manager at Compuware

About the Author

Ka Iok 'Kent' Tong, has a Master degree in Computer Science from the New South Wales University, Sydney, Australia. He was the winner of the Macao Programming Competition (Open Category) In 1992. He has been involved in professional software development, training and project management since 1993. Since 2002 he has been actively promoting Agile Development in Macao.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Macau Productivity and Technology Transfer Center (June 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9993776726
• ISBN-13: 978-9993776727
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,685,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning skills means doing - and this book delivers, March 21, 2006

By 

Chuck Sphar - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essential Skills for Agile Development (Paperback)

Kent Tong Ka Iok's book contains far more code than commentary, and I'm learning, really learning, some of these skills now in a way that never came through in all of the dozen or so books on agile techniques that I've read before.

Oh, I'd occasionally like a little more commentary than he delivers, and I'd sure like a good editor to work it over and clean up the prose, but the examples are first-rate, non-toy examples, and the chapter exercises are making me think in whole new ways about writing my own code. I'd love to see lots more examples and exercises in some of the chapters, especially the code smells chapter (where he only covers a few of the smells from Martin Fowler's list in Refactoring). I've also found a few errata that I haven't been able to report because of problems on Kent's site (www.agileskills.org) - but I've emailed him about that.

I don't want to pull punches here, which is why I've mentioned several negatives about the book. But those are nothing compared to the book's qualities. This is one of those great, really valuable books, like Fowler's Refactoring and Freeman & Freeman's Head First Design Patterns. You can find out how great without spending a penny: download the chapters from Kent's site (but note that they won't print, and you can't copy the text, which is why I eagerly came to Amazon and bought the hard copy, which I'm avidly annotating as I work through the examples and exercises). Get this book!

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitly a great book for OO and XP beginner., May 19, 2005

By 

Simon Pau "Simon Pau" (Macau) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essential Skills for Agile Development (Paperback)

Kent is really doing a good job on writing this book that focus on OO problems and solutions by using examples without using too much boring theory words.

The idea of pointing out "code smell" in source code described in this book really helps programmers know when they should do something OO to keep code fit.

I highly recommended people should read this book first before reading any OO design pattern books. Once you understand the OO basic and concept, later you will figure out "Oh, that example in this book is using strategy pattern!, oh that code is using visitor pattern!" I am sure after you read this book, you will believe how amazing that this book can help you and me!

4.0 out of 5 stars It's a good book for the beginner of Agile Development, May 19, 2005

By 

Chu Tan Ieong - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Essential Skills for Agile Development (Paperback)

Kent, a programming genius in Macao, has been actively promoting XP for serveral years. This is a good book coming from the course material of the XP course in CPTTM. I was ever a newbie of XP, however, with this book, I merge my mind with a newer, more powerful, more effective devopment methodology.

Automate Testing and Test Driven is the kernel of XP. Readers are able to learn a more effective way of how to write tests, especially acceptance tests.

Not only does Kent introduce new skills of testing, but also introduce important skills of OO programming. Once and Once Only, IOC principle,etc, newbies of OO can learn essential skills from this book under Kent's simple explaination.

Kent is my teacher of OO. Without him, I was still struggling at the dark age of the Procedure Oriented programming.

If you are a newbie of OO or stranger of XP, don't doubt, read this book immediately. You will soon realize that the sky of OO and XP 's world is Free !