Working with Jim Newkirk
Jim Newkirk and I joined the Gotdotnet team at the roughly the same time, a couple of months ago, although he just recently announced the move on his blog. Shortly after we joined the team, Jim and I were sitting in a meeting with a vendor who suddenly asked him, 'Do people come up to you at conferences and ask for your autograph? If so, how do you handle that, ya know, from an ego perspective?' That's not exactly how he phrased it of course, but it seemed like an awkward question to respond to from my perspective.
Jim's response was classic. He said, 'It's pretty easy to not get too egotistical when the people who are reading your books post comments like 'Your book was the low point of 2001' on Amazon'. Everybody around the table chuckled and nodded; it is infinitely reassuring to be around a person who has every reason to be egotistical but is not. Then, without breaking stride, Jim said plainly, "Think about what happened in 2001." After a pregnant pause, everybody in the room began to laugh. The low point of 2001...
Needless to say, it is both an honor and a joy to work with such a humble, capable, and esteemed member of the development community. I just had to find the ironic (and IMO undeserved) comment to which Jim referred....
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Maybe I should give a better rating to this book, but both authors have already wrote very good books & papers, so...Honestly, I don't understand why they write this book. The experiment doesn't reflect the field realities (2 gurus working together, for an internal project !), the book is rather short and filled with uneeded source code (if I want it, I get a Java book). At the end of the book, I didn't get the impression to have learn something valuable. My advice is to prefer (for the same target) "Extreme programming installed" which gives a true return on experience about XP, or even "Extreme Programming Explored",called "the XP FAQ" by myself.Bob & James, you are great guys. Really ! I lot of your writtings is more than valuable, and I got them. That's why I owned this book blindly. I'm afraid to say that it was my "disapointment of the year". Sorry.Was this review helpful to you? Ummm, NO. |