Review by Billy Barron, Tek-Tools

This is a strange double review where two books are going to get covered at once. They are "Extreme Programming in Practice" by Newkirk and Martin (AWL, ISBN 0-201-70937-6) and "Extreme Programming Explored" (AWL, ISBN 0-201-73397-8) by William Wake. Both books basically take you through a real project to show you how XP actually works in practice.

I have to ask AWL a question at this point. Aren't there more than enough XP books on the market already? Addison-Wesley has 7 books just by themselves on the topic. Amazon tells me that Wiley has 2 more on the way although one of them is a combo Unified and XP book.

As far as these two books go, they are roughly equal. "In Practice" is more of a detailed overview of an XP project that has already happened. You get to see the mistakes along the way. "Explored" is written in second person and walks you through an ideal XP project.

Both books are well written and useful. However, I see no reason to buy both books as they largely cover the same ground.

If I was building a complete XP book library, I would have the "Explained" and "Planning" books for sure. FYI, if you are the person who took my copy of "Explained", please return it to me. :-) Then one of these two books would be a maybe. "Examined" is the other one possibly of use. I'd skip the rest.