Java Extreme Programming Cookbook

I found this book immediately useful. I say immediately because the recipes presented in this book are succinct and to the point. It has already helped me in several consulting assignments.You don't have to be a die hard believer in all aspects of XP to find this book useful either. If you're a Java developer and you believe in unit testing, this book is worthwhile. It will help you sort through the various tools out there and find the best one for your situation. It will also give you clear explanations and examples of good techniques.

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 Features2. Tests Reduce Bugs in Existing Features3. Tests Are Good Documentation4. Tests Reduce the Cost of Change5. Tests Improve Design6. Tests Allow Refactoring7. Tests Constrain Features8. Tests Defend Against Other Programmers9. Testing Is Fun10. Testing Forces You to Slow Down and Think11. Testing Makes Development Faster12. Tests Reduce FearAny 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!

The Java Extreme Programming Cookbook by Eric Burke and Brian Coyner features more than 100 recipes for using extreme programming tools. The tools covered are the build tool Ant, various testing tools, like JUnit, HttpUnit, Cactus and JunitPerf, and XDoclet. Included is also a chapter about deploying projects to Tomcat and JBoss.As always with O'Reilly cookbooks the recipies you will find in this book are of great quality and go straight to the point. Even if you already are an extreme programming devotee (and who isn't ;-) you will find a lot of interesting tips.Especially interesting is the chapter about Cactus. You need to test server side Java code? This chapter gives you a jumpstart introduction to it. You will learn how to set up and configure Cactus and how to write Cactus tests to test session tracking, servlet filters or JSPs. This book offers a lot of great solutions and should not be missing in any bookshelf.