Rating:  - Extreme Programming Misadventures in C#
In spirit, the book covers Extreme Programming, but please don't expect the code to hold up. I would say if you want to learn C#, don't write a book to do it. Why should I pay Mr. Jeffries to learn the language (and it is evident that he did not learn it well), and get the same old comments about Extreme Programming that other books have given me?
I did find it comical that he states that he likes to keep things simple but when it comes to Xml, he would rather write an Xml parser / validator himself than to use what the platform provides. I guess the next thing we will see now that we have the editor, is a new operating system built from the ground up to prove that we need the editor :).
Save your money and buy another book in the series, and Ron... you owe each of us $50 for teaching you C#, but I will take $25 since you didn't seem to get a lot out of it.
Rating:  - Very engaging and useful
Ron's intention with this book is to show that iterative and incremental software development works. And that it works especially well on projects where requirements are evolving and/or the technical or even the business domain is new to the people doing the work. He refers to this way of working throughout the book. However, I think probably the only thing that I sort of disliked about the book is how profusely he apologizes for this seemingly simplistic, risky way of programming without any Big-Design-Up-Front. That irritation is likely due to the fact that I also consider this a very good way of creating software so it gets a little tiresome reading those same apologies over and over.
The book is written in a very conversational style that makes it an easy read and even though it kills a lot more trees I found it good that the code gets repeated throughout as it morphs into being. The writing is quite good and the way he tells his story is very captivating. One is able to feel frustrated, relieved, gloomy and victorious along with Ron because he makes you feel that this is your project too and almost as if you have a say in its implementation.
Ron has a lot of good advice to offer and he drops numerous great tips that any programmer would benefit from reading. These tips concern general design of software, programming techniques, planning, learning, estimating and listening to yourself and the code.
On the whole I feel a better software developer for reading it and I highly recommend it.
Rating:  - Great book about how to think about programming
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.
Rating:  - Disappointing!
First perusal implied this might be a fun read. The book is certainly chatty and easy to read - very much like reading your young nephew's diary (not that I've read my nephew's diary, but you get my drift!). And that's its biggest problem - the rather juvenile "enthusiastic" style soon pales when you realise how low the "signal to noise" ratio of the content is. It seems ironic that this is part of a series Microsoft are calling "Microsoft Professional" when it seems so... well amateur! What you're paying for here is effectively the diary of someone completely new to .Net starting to write code (an XML text editor) without so much as a basic training course, documenting every tedious little thing he learns as he learns it. The author tries to convince us he is the customer, the designer, the trainer, the developer... and occasionally he consults his friend because after all Extreme Programming talks about developers working in pairs, but it all comes across as very Mickey Mouse and incredibly naive. If you've just taught yourself C# as your first programming language this "diary of a .Net newbie applying extreme programming methodologies" might be a fun read, but if you're an "enterprise developer" I suspect you're going to be pretty disappointed at how "amateur" the development project is and at how tedious the documenting of every little code change becomes when it goes on for page after page after page.
This may be an unfair review because it's written without having finished the book. I'm afraid that by Chapter 10 I'd realised that life's too short to spend time on so much "noise" for so little "signal". It seems odd to have released this title at about the same time as its "companion" series book "Object Thinking" as they are as alike as chalk and cheese ("Object Thinking" is a far better book for the enterprise developer in my view, albeit one with shock! horror! no code in it).
Rating: - and I'll try to even things out
This is an excellent book - it does what I believe it was intended to do. The walk-through of a full project using the test driven approach is a very unique insight into this practice. You can read methodology books for weeks - but this book actually shows you how to apply the methodology. It gets a little terse at times, but is otherwise a technical book you can actually - read - and get lots out of. It's definately not a reference, but that's not the intention. It's also not built to provide source code to an XML Editor, it's designed to show you how the code was built over a lengthy amount of time to arrive at an XML Editor. These reviews should be on the content and intended goals of the book. Good job, Mr. Jeffries
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