Product Description: Want to be a better developer? This books collects the personal habits, ideas, and approaches of successful agile software developers and presents them in a series of short, easy-to-digest tips. This isn't academic fluff; follow these ideas and you'll show yourself, your teammates, and your managers real results. These are the proven and effective agile practices that will make you a better developer.
This book will help you improve five areas of your career:
The Development Process
What to Do While Coding
Developer Attitudes
Project and Team Management
Iterative and Incremental Learning
These practices provide guidelines that will help you succeed in delivering and meeting your user's expectations, even if the domain is unfamiliar. You'll be able to keep normal project pressure from turning into disastrous stress while writing code, and see how to effectively coordinate mentors, team leads, and developers in harmony.
You can learn all this stuff the hard way, but this book can save you time and pain. Read it, and you'll be a better developer.
The other Agile book Spring-boarding off The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and the Agile development philosophy, Andy and Venkat provide a readable, conceptual book that offers highly referenced and useful information without being too implementation-specific.
Unlike other Agile books, such as The Art of Agile Development (which is in its own right an excellent book), Practices of an Agile Developer keeps its information readable and specific without devolving into the dictatorial tone of a manual.
Also unique is this book's approach to *balance*, as said book offers suggestions both in general practice and in keeping practices in check. This advice is particularly useful, as it shies away from otherwise "silver bullet" approaches to Agile development.
Overall, an excellent book, and a good counterpart to the original Pragmatic Programmer and other books co-authored by Andy Hunt and Venkat Subramaniam.
Pragmatic Agility This book is a Pragmatic, method agnostic guide to the essential practices for people who are part of an agile team and want to understand agile principles. The book covers the whole lifecycle form planning to design and coding, showing you how to balance the agile dogma with practical considerations. The book also describes common misconceptions about agile practices and discusses how to address them. People new to agile will lean much from the book, and those who have been agile will benefit from a fresh look at why they are using agile practices, whether they are using Scrum, XP, or any other agile method.
No lightbulb moments in here if you're an intermediate-advanced XPer Pros: The book is short (1-2 day read). A collection of ~50 bullets... in Prag Prog style. Simple and easy to read. Good advice for agile beginners.. good book to get a jumpstart. Some items on being a good team member may serve as a quick reflective scan for personal flaws.
Cons: It didnt meet my expectations (set by PP's Version Control, Unit testing, Automation, etc) You'd be better served by Beck's XP and TDD book, Fowler's Refactoring book and CI post.
Disappointed There are couple of things in this book that disappointed me quite a lot. Or maybe I was just expecting too much after reading Pragmatic Programmer.
First, the book is aimed at programmers only. It doesn't explain agile from any different perspective rather than if you work in a company with five people and you talk directly to the client. Nothing about agile from the perspective of other stakeholders. Which is probably how authors work while they're not writing books. As they say:
"Traditional books on software development might start with roles you'll need on a project, followed by many Artifacts you need to produce (documents, checklists, Gantt charts, and so on).... Well, we're not going to do any of that here. Welcome to agility, where we do things a bit differently."
Please, no documents? No Gantt charts and checklists? Be it an agile or any other methodology, developers are not alone on the project with the client. There's at least a project manager who has to keep all other things in check besides few developers having a blast doing agile. There are other, non development related teams. And not just that PM needs documentation, checklists, and Gantt charts; development team also needs to adapt to fit in the larger picture. There's nothing like this in the book. Nothing whatsoever for managers outside the development team and nothing for the development team that has to work closely with others. (There is a one page section called The Manager's Guide, but that's pretty useless)
Second, the book is just a set of good practices, advices, what an agile programmer should do, how should one think, how should the team communicate, etc. It is not really an agile methodology explained. For really understanding most crucial agile practices, the authors frequently suggest some four, five other titles they wrote earlier. For example you won't find much about Scrum and how to implement it, you have to know that from before or buy another book. There's exactly two pages devoted to Scrum / Sprint.
Thirdly, out of all the 45 advices, many apply to just any programmer, not just agile. Even more, a lot of those apply to just about any employee, be it working in fast food joint or wherever (how you should be nice to your teammates, communicate often, don't force ego, etc.).
Having said all that, it's still a nice read in a way. It's just far from what I was looking for to help introduce agile into existing organization with many different stakeholders.
Beyond good and evil The book makes one mistake on its own cover. The apparently "bad" angel is sitting on the person's right shoulder, while the "good" angel, on his left. If this book wants to be a hundred percent correct, I suggest for the locations of the two angels to be swapped. Everyone in the world knows that the right hand is the "good" hand. There is no reason for the bad angel to sit on the person's right shoulder, unless of course the angels represent two different brain hemispheres and are controlling the opposite sides of the body.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
