Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices

I was a faithful reader of the column "The Craftsman" by "Uncle Bob" in Software Development Magazine before reading this book, so, I sort of knew what I was getting at when started to read this.

First this is a generic book about agile and modern software development. It mainly covers principles, patterns and practices (PPP), but, it also provides some content on Methodology and processes (e.g., XP). The first chapters are easy to read and the difficulty starts to grow as you go through the book. The style is kept from the 4th chapter on, with the text being interrupted by good example code (C++ and Java) that is also very easy to read.

By being a book about three things (ie, PPP) and intelligently mixing them, you get an actual good view of these things taken into practice together by a master in the field. Therefore, this is something that will get into your memory and will make you see how all these complex things can be handled also in parallel, as they are in the reality of software development projects.

Specially fun to read is the "Appendix C. A Satire of Two Companies". "Appendix D. The Source Code Is the Design." is also a must read for anyone that wants to understand why in modern software development programming is always considered as design.

Easy to read and useful (0/0 people found this helpful)

This is one of the most enjoyable and informative computer books I have ever read.

The multitude of code examples is backed up by well thought out arguments and an enjoyable writing style, I cant recommend it highly enough.

Must Read (2/2 people found this helpful)

The other reviews sum up how good this book is so theres not much more to say other than that every developer should read it, oh and if your a C# developer then I'd recommend you consider two things:

1) You might want to hold on as there is a C# equivalent written coming out (0131857258), having said that this book is very relevant to C# as well as Java/C++.
2) When you get to the part of the book about designing your packages you'll probably want to look up the (free) NDepend utility.

excellent book on software design (5/5 people found this helpful)

Occupying conceptual ground between Bertrand Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction and The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas & Andy Roberts, this is equally as good as those books.

I would suggest having read the likes of Martin Fowler's Refactoring and the GoF patterns book first, as well as knowing how JUnit works, as the value of this book is in examples of how to use the various practices and how they work together, rather than detailed introductory material.

The opening section briefly covers XP practices. Highlights are the example of refactoring a prime-number-generating program, and in particular, a long example of using Test Driven Development to write a bowling scoring application in Java.

The second part concerns itself with the various design principles associated with OOD that have crystallised in the last few years, e.g. the Liskov Substitution Principle (one of the best discussions of this I've read), the Open-Closed Principle, the Single Responsibility Principle, the Dependency Inversion Principle etc.

The rest of the book alternates between case studies and introducing design patterns. This is not the book to read to learn about design patterns, but it is an excellent resource for thinking about where those patterns are useful and what the pros and cons are.

The text is well-written and the style conversational and witty. I recommend this book highly.

Eye opening text (2/2 people found this helpful)

Wow... this book is awesome. It's a great balance between academia and real life. It goes in to *real* application of patterns - rather then using patterns for their own sake. And encourages a work-ethic that really makes sense. Plus even has ideas for metrics for management.

There are some practices that I still cannot agree with (the use of extern style globals for example) - but the book is written as guidelines and promotes gut feelings and "smells" of code. It's pretty amusing to read, in a geek sort'a way.

I wish I had this text back when I was university - though I'm glad I've come across it now because I know it's made me a more productive developer.

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices

Robert C. Martin

Reader Reviews:

Inspiring book on modern software development (1/1 people found this helpful)

Easy to read and useful (0/0 people found this helpful)

Must Read (2/2 people found this helpful)

excellent book on software design (5/5 people found this helpful)

Eye opening text (2/2 people found this helpful)

Similar Products

Categories