"Extreme Programming Installed" provides information on the practice of extreme programming in your organization. It's meant for those already using XP, rather than a casual reader wanting to get more insight. The confusing writing style and layout of the book make it a difficult cover-to-cover read.

The content is useful, but the chapters are not tied together well, skipping from one topic to another seemingly at random. This causes a great deal of confusion on the part of a reader intent on reading the book sequentially. The detail level varies wildly, from excellent 50,000 foot overviews of concepts, to confusing minute by minute minutia of detailed work. The extremely conversational stream of consciousness tone and constant cross references muddy the points the authors making -- the reader's too busy trying to figure out what they are trying to say. This is a useful reference guide to groups who have already begun to implement extreme programming, but I cannot recommend it to those who want to learn more about this exciting lightweight methodology.

XP is a nice fresh way of looking at the software development process and this book explains XP concisely and clearly. You may or may not agree to -all- of the principles they advocate, but if you have any interest in your work at all, you will find parts of this gripping. Especially the emphasis on unit tests and the test-first programming idea. And so useful in practice too! Anyone involved with making software, or indeed anyone else who is interested in increasing the quality of what you're working on whatever it is, should read this! So better borrow it from your neighbour (reading once is sufficient, no need to own this book).

I am writing a new review. I mentioned, in my previous review, that I am acknowledged in the credits as having contributed, but I don't think I wrote a clear review. In a nutshell, this is one of the few programming books I keep right next to my keyboard for sound advice on Unit Testing and a variety of software construction, even though the company I am at does not do full XP (yet). The book assumes you have bought the concepts in "Extreme Programming Explained." While that is a great book, it is theory and one is still left with "Well, how do I do it?" This book shows you step by step. One of the problems I had in the previous book and on the Web, was understanding User Stories and User Story Estimation. This book leads you through the process. One of the wonderful things about Extreme Programming is that it is a lightweight, yet rigorous process. In this day of huge process like CMM and ISO9000, which most programmers totally reject, XP is light enough and common sense enough to be adopted. In fact, many of the pratcices in this book are totally useful even if you have not totally adopted XP. Example: At my current company, we need to add Unit Tests fast. This book gave me the step by step procedures to do just that. The book covers in detail all the XP practices with examples. One of the only downfalls of the book is that a lot of the examples are in Smalltalk, a language that the authors favor, but few use. I had a hard time with the examples, however I finally understood them, and there is a Java section. Overall, XP is a revolution in software development and this book is the guide!