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Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World (Pragmatic Programmers)
Venkat Subramaniam, Andy Hunt Average Rating: 
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| Customer Reviews 1-5 of 32 | NEXT >> |
2008-11-27Spring-boarding off The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and the Agile development philisophy, Andy and Venkat provide a readable, conseptual book that offers highly refferenced and usefull information without being too implementation-specific.
Unlike other Agile books, such as The Art of Agile Development (which is in its own right an excelllent 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 parituclarily usefull, as it shies away from otherwise "silver bullet" approachs to Agile development.
Overall, an excelllent book, and a good counterpart to the orginal Pragmatic Programmer and other books co-authored by Andy Hunt and Venkat Subramaniam.
2008-11-12This book is a Pragmatic, method agnostic guide to the essesital practices for people who are part of an agile team and want to understand agile priciples. The book covers the whole lifecycle form planning to design and coding, showing you how to balance the agile dogma with practical conciderations. The book also describes common misconseptions 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 benifit from a fresh look at why they are using agile practices, whether they are using Scrum, XP, or any other agile method.
2008-11-01Pros: 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 begginers.. good book to get a jumpstart. Some items on being a good team member may serve as a quick reflective scan for personel flaws.
Cons: It didnt meet my expectations (set by PP's Version controll, Unit testing, Automation, etc) You'd be better served by Beck's XP and TDD book, Fowler's Refactoring book and CI post.
2008-09-20There 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 doesnt explain agile from any diffrent 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 (doccuments, 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 diffrently."
Please, no doccuments? 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 doccumentation, 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 whereever (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 diffrent stakeholders.
2008-07-09The book makes one mistake on its own cover. The aparently "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 diffrent brain hemispheres and are controllling the oposite sides of the body.
Please change the cover. Thank you.
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| Editorial Review |
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.
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