Review by Billy Barron, Delphi Consultants

"Extreme Programming Installed" by Ron Jefferies, Ann Anderson, and Chet Hendrickson (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-70842-6) is the first book on XP by someone other than Beck and Fowler. This is the thickest book on XP to date. Ron Jefferies is very well known in the XP community.

To a large extent, this book covers the same material as "Extreme Programming Explained". Additionally, this volume covers more material and in more depth.

First off, I noticed the art work in this book and didn't think much of it. The low point of it is definitely the art at the beginning of chapter 9, where Chet looks like he is nude.

One of the problems with the XP community is that they tend to be preachy and conscending most of the time. In the other XP books, Martin Fowler kept Kent Beck in check. Unfortunately, Installed does not have anyone balancing this tendency.

The book is broken up into 34 short chapters. Needless to say, I won't give you a chapter by chapter account here. Almost every possible XP related topic is covered at some point.

Overall, this book is average. It might even be good, but compared to "XP Explained", it fails short. "XP Explained" is a wonderful work to read whereas this book is only average. However, it does have good information.