Drew Kurry is a senior technical architect in Denver and is Sun certified at the Architect, Developer, and Programmer levels. He has been architecting, designing, and implementing Java solutions for a wide array of customers for the last seven years in Denver. He recently left the consulting business to join Jeppesen as a full-time employee.

There has been a fair amount of press towards agile processes within the Java community and the competing methodologies and tools to accompany these processes. This book focuses attention on the Extreme Programming methodology, with emphasis on tools that should be used alongside this process.

The book starts off explaining some of the main features of XP and the overall emphasis on simplicity. After that, it dives into Apache Ant and test-related open source tools, including those that stem from JUnit. The approach to learning these tools is done via a cookbook format, with all topics following a brief problem statement, solution and discussion. The reader will be impressed with the solutions section, as this is where most of the information and code samples are contained.

I found this book to be very enjoyable to read and to use as a reference on projects. In my opinion, it should not be read from cover to cover, but, instead used as a reference when one needs additional reading and education on JUnit. The book does a fantastic job in covering the highlights from JUnit Test Suites to JUnitPerf. There are some pages devoted to XDoclet; however, this seems somewhat out of place, as most of the book is really about test-related frameworks. Although XDoclet technology fits under the umbrella of this book, in practicality, this book is more about JUnit and Ant. It even addresses J2EE projects using web based frameworks and devotes a fair amount of examples in testing code to this popular and most frequently un-tested area with automation.

At the time of reading this book, I was not familiar with JUnit and needed a quick reference and examples to relate to code for which I was working on. I found this book to address my needs and found it well worth reading. For those looking to learn in-depth analysis about XP and the comparisons against Rational Unified Process (RUP) or other methodologies, this book will not suffice. The title of this book may cause some not to read it as they will think it is for XP projects, but, instead I found it valuable to any project regardless of process used or project size. The tools covered within this book are too powerful to dismiss. Testing should happen as code is being developed not at the end. Gone are the days of System.out.println to locate bugs.