The recipes presented by Burke & Coyner are to the point. After reading through the first 8 chapters, I haven't met a recipe I couldn't immediately see use for in my recent projects.

Instead of digging through the documentation of your open-source tool, take a look at this book. The first two chapters give an overview of extreme programming (XP), but the rest of the chapters are focused on the tools of XP. Each of the chapters on the tools begin with a brief description of the tool (and I mean brief). The rest of the chapter is sub divided into sections. Within each section, a problem that one might encounter with the tool is introduced, then a solution is proposed and discussion of the solutions follows (with an example).

The tools covered are Ant, Junit, HttpUnit, Mock Objects, Cactus, JunitPerf and Xdoclet. Tomcat and JBoss are addressed in a chapter together. Because of the brevity and focus of the book, probably not everything that you want to know about a tool is mentioned. After you already know why and when to use a tool, this book can help with the how.

The book is a good reference tool and could save someone a lot of time, but look elsewhere for more in-depth explanations.

I like books which get to the point with practical examples and easy to follow explanations of complicated technology. I had dabbled with JUnit and Ant, but wanted to take the next step: test-first development.

The authors obviously have a strong belief in testing. Here is a list from a companion article from the publisher's web site

"Top 12 Reasons to Write Unit Tests"
1. Tests Reduce Bugs in New Features
2. Tests Reduce Bugs in Existing Features
3. Tests Are Good Documentation
4. Tests Reduce the Cost of Change
5. Tests Improve Design
6. Tests Allow Refactoring
7. Tests Constrain Features
8. Tests Defend Against Other Programmers
9. Testing Is Fun
10. Testing Forces You to Slow Down and Think
11. Testing Makes Development Faster
12. Tests Reduce Fear

Any of these ring true with you? They did with me too. I immediately bought the book. I initially wanted to learn about Mock Object's to help build test rigging for a complicated environment at work. After my success, I thought the book would end up on the bookshelf, but, because the book is so approachable and easy to read I found myself exploring other topics (in my case XDoclets and the discussion on XP in general). Check it out. It's a really great (and hands-on) introduction to this technology!