Category: Book Review

A report on the books, tools, and toys that have recently wandered through my life.

Author Matthew B. Crawford is a physicist, has a Ph.D. in political philosophy, and is a motorcycle mechanic. What's not to like? Recommended for practitioners, managers, executives.

Justin Gehtland, Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer bring us a valuable and enjoyable book describing Ajax. It is full of running examples, points out the major gotchas, and it's a good read too! Recommended!

Scott and Pramod have done an excellent job with this book. It's full of practical advice about how to improve your database design, when to do it, and even how to manage the transitions. If your project involves a database, this book can help.

Bill Bryson writes a delicious book that lives up to its title. The cosmos, the earth, atoms, geology, life, homo sapiens -- it's all here.

This isn't just one of those self-improvement books. It asks us to dig deeply into our own feelings about people and situations. Reading this with an open mind will ask some hard questions that need answers.

This book is painful to read for anyone who understands what XP is, because it goes to such pains not to understand, to take out of context, and to distort. It is dangerous to read for anyone who does not understand what XP is, because it goes to such pains not to understand, to take out of context, and to distort.

Barry Boehm and Richard Turner have produced an important and balanced book about agile versus plan-driven methods. Unfortunate title, perhaps, and a few things to disagree with, but highly recommended.

Jeff, an experienced XP coach, takes a hard look at Pete McBreen's book, and finds it to contain good questions. He feels that the answers fall short -- perhaps due to Pete's inexperience with XP.

If you are serious about your profession, if you are serious about teamwork, if you are serious about success, please read this book.

Updated to include our first review of Java Tools for eXtreme Programming. These books are all about agile software development, even those written before the term existed. They're all worth having and reading, more than once. Dig in!

Chet and Ron have been working with Ruby, because it's the nearest thing there is to Smalltalk. Here are the books we use.

Chet looks at some humor and some ancient architecture. We leave it to you to figure out which is which.

A detective in puce, mentoring, massive parallel processing, and two books on writing. What more could you want?

This is the first of a regular series of book reviews. We'll only review books we have read, and we'll call them the way we see them. This time we look at five books, ranging from XSLT to the world of Dream. Updated to add a sixth on time management

In this review, Extreme Programming Installed, Planning Extreme Programming, Extreme Programming Explained, The Humane Interface, and Adaptive Software Development.