Customer Reviews

Essential Skills for Agile Development

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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!

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 !

This is a book for software developers interested in gaining the right skills for agile development.

This book has an elegant yet highly effective minimalist style. Rather than long theoretical discussion (of the type I'm sometimes guilty of writing) the book does what it does by example - and there's plenty of example code given.

For example, in chapter 2 - turning comments into code - Kent examines some typical code (I've seen enough like it) littered with comments that are apparently intended to make life easier. Step by step he takes us through removing the comments and expanding variable and method names to show the intent of the code - along the way pointing out useful refactorings to improve the overall code structure and make clearer what's going on. It's a convincing description and easily applied.

Overall the book covers many topics and issues related to agile software development, including: keeping code fit; handling inappropriate references; seperating database, UI and domain logic; unit testing and acceptance testing amongst others.

The thing I really like about this book, and the reason I would recommend it to developers, is that even if you're not doing full on "agile" development, there's still plenty of useful material in it. The lack of hype is also refreshing - the book focuses on examples and shows good solutions. You should get it!