The book's scope is well-defined and its methodology (including a running "task list" that is updated at the end of each chapter with strikeouts and new items) is innovative. But it falls sadly short in execution.

The text is overloaded with cutesy digressions that only serve to obscure the topic at hand and irritate the reader. No "Head First" title, this. To read this book is to wish over and over that its author had had the humility to submit it to another editor's series rather than launching it under his own.

Still, there is no other book quite like it on this subject, and I can certainly recommend it for extended bookstore browsing. You may find you are less sensitive than me to Beck's assaults on clarity, in which case by all means go forth and buy.

Overall, this was a great read. I love books with tiny chapters, giving you good stopping points where you can meditate on what you just read while you're busy with life's other challenges. Beck goes into TDD as well as design concepts such as you might find in Scott Bain's Emergent Design book. Patterns are also lightly discussed.


I also love Kent Beck's casual writing style. For those of us who don't have 16 hours a day to devote to our computer, it's nice to have some humor and casual speaking happening in a book which only a hardcore reader will read -- like myself.

I give the book 4 stars, but there are a few *glaring* question marks.

First, there is no introductory chapter on using JUnit or any other *Unit.
Kent wouldn't have even had to write such a chapter himself - maybe one of the tech reviewers! You have to give the reader something to go on, even if you just merely assume the reader will use JUnit in a CLI dev environment. Or discuss all the assert calls. I dunno. Weird. But not a huge deal, and I knew how it worked already, anyway.

Second, and this is a biggie, why on Earth Kent would choose as an example writing xUnit for the second section is so beyond me I have no words. He hints later that he likes to write a *Unit library for each new language he learns, as an exercise. But, good lord, it's so hard to wrap your brain around incestuous "writing yourself" concept -- couldn't he just written something else? We're trying to learn TDD here. Geez. I mostly skimmed the whole section as it was too hard to follow.

Third, in that same section, Kent decides he will move away from Java, a language most of us already know and, if not, looks like a whole host of other languages so it's easy to follow and fairly verbose. Right, he decides to use -- ready? -- PYTHON! A language very few people know and has some strange idioms. This would be akin to writing the chapter using arcane Ruby or Perl structures. The whole second section has you trying to catch up on the language and the recursive xUnit example so much that it completely distracts from the TDD lessons.

OK, here's a fourth. Two very good examples for TDD are practically side notes. I used his late-book example of a Triangle class to do TDD for real for the first time and it was an excellent example! I did it all and only when I completed it did I read his tests. It was great, and I look forward to trying out the Fibonacci Sequence which is an *appendix*.

Why not put these in the book and explain them?

But it's still a good read. Try to avoid buying it for $40 - $50 though. I read it in 2 days without much effort, so not sure it's worth the price. But it's still very good despite all this.

This book is good, IF you haven't read the Martin Fowlers refactoring the code ( not back to design patterns, but just refactoring ), other than that it has some cool insights ...


Ok to buy and keep it for reference sake ...

Helpful for all XPrs out there

Regards,
Vyas, Anirudh

This is the most inpiring and thought-provocing book on programming that I have read for many years. Very well-written, short, fun. Whatever language you are programming in, you will find it useful.
Niels Holst, Aarhus University.

I really like this book and it helps me a lot when I was developing a prototype of a complex application.

The idea of using tests to force you to think about the APIs is powerfull and the use of Python to implement a xUnit framework is very interesting.

But if you are a experienced developer you will find the first part of the book very boring because Kent uses extremely small steps to develop their example.