Extreme Programming for Web Projects (XP Series)

Beware, agile methods make up less than half the content in this light-weight book. Gives an overview of the web development process with a mere 28 pages devoted to XP coding for the web - focusing on XML. If not technical, discussions on managing web design and creativity in teams would have been great. Alas, not to be. A superficial single-afternoon read filled with white spaces, half-page cartoons and paragraphs on the obvious.

This book's premise is an interesting one: Does XP work for web projects, and if so then how does one go about implementing it? The authors are up front about the first question in the opening to Chapter 1: "Sort of" they say. The book's entire content struck me as a continuation of that statement.

The book attempts to be a bit too general in many aspects: there's a lot of high-level coverage of XP tenets without much utility specific to web development. The general coverage of XP is nice, but you'll find better content in other works; however, the authors didn't intend for this to be a seminal work on XP anyway, so that's not a big issue.

Several sections do provide good information specific to XP in web development, such as Chapter 8 (Graphics Design) and its emphasis on how to wrap customers in to the process early. Another example would be the discussion in Chapter 11 (Planning) on how the "customer" in web development differs a bit from what XP usually considers a "customer."

There's also a lot of good discussion at a high level on how the use of XML vice static HTML as data can greatly benefit the development process. There are good overviews of XML in general, XSLT from 30,000 feet, and a nice blurb on how the Tidy tool can help you keep out of trouble.

The downside of this book is that too often it stretches too far to make the connection between XP and web development. It's not detailed enough as a reference for implementing XP practices, and it doesn't do a good enough job of tying web development into XP for those looking to solve that problem.

The book is concise and well-written, but that doesn't make up for its fundamental weaknesses.

XP for Web Projects is a very good configuration the XP approach for web site and web application development. The section on user interface architecture provides a very functional and elegant framework for managing technical development and user input simultaneously. I've tested this book's techniques on real world enterprise level web application development with multiple clients and now base all my project on them.

I'm not a programmer but I work in the heart of a web team. This book brings balance to the process of creating websites and harmonizes the often confusing roles of programmers, graphic designers and the rest of the web team. Well done.

I particularly liked the graphical design process and how they have taken a very difficult process and turned it into an easy to follow and organic experience. This book has defiantly made me a better professional.

I am a programmer. I don't write Java or C# or Perl or any server side code. I am the guy that works on the interface side of web sites doing very complicated XML and XSL. This is the first book on programming that understands my role on web projects and that pure software development methodologies don't take my needs into account.

The clear online of roles and how team members can work together to create powerful websites given by this book is great. I also really liked the chapters describing how to use XML and XSL to separate content from presentation. It has given the sites I work on far more fluid structures. Hats off to Wallace, Aufgang and Raggett.