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Book Reviews

This book review was submitted by a DenverJUG member as part of the Book Review Program.

BOOK DETAILS

REVIEWER

Anshuman Purohit

REVIEW

Today, you don't have to be a Kent Beck or Martin Fowler to appreciate the value of refactoring, continuous integration, or "test first" development. These are time-tested best practices. The readily (freely) available tools contribute much to their success. However, in absence of a blueprint, much was left to the evangelists. Maturity of the tools and subsequent popularity of the agile methodology warranted that this gap to be filled. This book is an honest effort towards that direction.

What this is (not)?

This book is a collection of important tips and tricks for using a few highly popular automation tools. The Java XP Cookbook is a collection of some tried-and-true solutions to practical problems. Recipes in this cookbook are short, accurate, useful, and focused pieces of code that can easily be incorporated overnight. I think everybody will find some or the other recipe that saves you enough time and effort to pay for the book's price.

This book doesn't promise to be an extreme-programming reference. Only the first chapter talks about the methodology itself. So, even if you are not in the XP bandwagon and somebody trying to automate some routine (but required) software development steps, this book can give you a jump-start. This book is not a complete reference of Java XP tools, either. It pardons the reader of the bulk of outdated API documentation. Readers have better online documentation (source code) to refer to, if they need to dig deeper.

Although this book presents very easy to read and accurate "recipes," it is not intended to be a Java XP tools tutorial/workbook.

Organization of the book

Java XP Cookbook starts with a concise introduction to the XP methodology, and then has chapters on a number of automation tools. Apache Ant, the de facto standard in Java make tool, is covered very thoroughly. Next, it goes though JUnit and other test automation tools based on JUnit. These chapters form the core of the book. Code generation through XDoclet comes next. Each chapter is collection of mini how-to's about the tool, organized into problem statement, solution, and implementation (thank God they never call them as "Patterns").

Some improvement opportunities

Cookbooks organize their recipes into "How to cook a chocolate cake," "How to make lentil soup," etc. and not "How to best use a skillet." Java XP recipes can be better organized around solving bigger problems like test automation, server side test automation, code generation etc. Although organizing the recipes around tools, sort of organizes them around solving a common problem the tools was designed to do, some recipes that require a combination of tools don't find themselves a natural place in the book.

Organizing the book as a tutorial (like "Java Tools for Extreme Programming," by Richard Hightower and Nicholas Lesiecki) is another very good idea. But then, it wouldn't be a Cookbook anymore.

Overall, this book presents some hidden treasures in the land of Java Extreme Programming. I enjoyed reading it.