Extreme Programming Adventures in C# (DV-Microsoft Professional) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "My colleague Chet Hendrickson and I are working with .NET and C#, to learn it, with the intention of writing the book you're holding in..." (more)
Key Phrases: tests all run, string accelerator, private static string, Visual Studio, Customer Acceptance Tests, Insert Ore (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Apply what you know about extreme programming and object-oriented design to learning C# and the Microsoft® .NET Framework on the fly. Author Ron Jeffries, a leading voice and practitioner in the extreme programming movement, demonstrates how to apply its key concepts—including the use of customer stories, customer acceptance tests, and "Spikes"—and the fundamental techniques of Simple Design, Test-Driven Development, and Refactoring to create practical, .NET-ready applications. You’ll also learn how to use NUnit, a unit-testing tool for .NET languages. This essential, high-level reference provides the expert guidance, hands-on insights, and downloadable code you need to build an XML editor, a database application, a Web service, and other useful applications—quickly extending your extreme programming expertise to .NET and helping you deliver business value right away.

About the Author

Ronald E. Jeffries was the on-site coach for the original eXtreme programming (XP) project. An independent consultant who has been involved in XP for more than five years, he has presented numerous talks and published several papers on the topic. He and his teams have built operating systems, compilers, relational database systems, and a wide range of applications. He is the most prolific on-line author by far in eXtreme Programming and related topics

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (March 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735619492
• ISBN-13: 978-0735619494
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #692,885 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Online Content, February 23, 2004

By	Ronald E Jeffries "Agilista: www.XProgramming... (Pinckney, MI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am the author, so I'm rating the book three, not because that's what I think it is, but because it's in the middle. I'll see whether I can get a comment added as author or otherwise update the page when Amazon gets back to me.

It appears that the online content isn't what at least one reader wanted it to be. It's chronological by date, so that readers can follow along which files changed as we went forward, and it sounds like at least one reader wanted the final version. My mistake: I wasn't expecting that.

I'm not sure why -- the point of the book is to follow along on how we develop, not really to provide a handy-dandy XML editor -- but if this reader or any other wants a final snapshot of the files, they should email me at ronjeffries at acm dot org and I'll gladly send them along. And I'll see whether we can add another batch of files to the online content.

Thanks for the feedback.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book about how to think about programming, March 23, 2004

By	Michael Cohn "agile developer" (Lafayette, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I learned to program back in the dark ages before books came with CDs or websites where you could download the author's code. Back then, if you wanted the author's code, you typed it in from the book. I typed in the code from many wonderful books and I learned to code that way. As I typed, I was paying attention to the code, not just mindlessly hitting the keys. While this taught me what a great programmer's code looked like when it was done, it didn't teach me how that programmer arrived at the solution that was in the book. What I always wanted was to see the author's thought process as he arrived at the finished code presented in the book.

With Ron Jeffries' "Extreme Programming Adventures in C#" I finally have that opportunity to watch over the shoulder of a great programmer and watch not only his code but, more importantly, how he thinks. I love that the author is willing to show his dead ends and false starts. And then how he recovers from them. The book is really language agnostic. It's in C# but the lessons are more about programming and thinking about programming than about a specific language. I highly recommend this to all programmers, not just C# programmers.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chatty, Witty Style that Teaches Several Lessons, March 23, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First, what this is not:

1. This is not a textbook on eXtreme Programming
2. This is not a textbook on C#
3. This is not a textbook on .NET

This book is, instead, a narrative trip through developing a software project using the techniques of eXtreme Programming, writing in the C# langauage, in an effort to learn the .NET environment.

Ron Jeffries has been a leading advocate of (if not the founder of) the eXtreme Programming concept. Rather than talk more about eXtreme Programming itself (he has several books on eXtreme Programming listed on Amazon) he is using a new format in this book to get away from the heavy tutorial/lecture approach used in the other books.

He, pair programming with Chet Hendrickson some of the time, first goes out and buys some C# text books. The first step is to learn a bit about C# so he starts working on some of the examples -- I was glad to see that the first attempts (like most of my own) didn't work, and he got a not very helpful diagnostic -- this sounds like my learning a new language. Then as he says, "I fumbled around in Visual Studio a fair amount." Yup, I understand. A few dozen pages later, "Well, it almost worked, but it didn't." Been there, done that. Another few dozen pages, "Found a bug, Write a Test. But we don't know how to test that particular bug."

I suspect from this you get the idea about this book. It's got a friendly, chatty, open writing style and along the way passes along some pretty deep messages about the subjects of XP, C# and XP. I like the style, it may or may not be your cup of tea.