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Really cool, funny book teaching Ruby here. Funner than "Mr. Bunny's Guide to Java" and actually educational.

Cutter IT Journal apparently published a study "What Metrics Say About XP" by Michael Mah where five XP projects were compared to five waterfall-style projects inside a medical devices company. The XP projects completed 25-30% sooner and had one fourth the defects of the traditional-style projects.

John Roth provides an idea to force programmers to create abstractions (hopefully appropriate for their application's domain). Quote:

Provide a switch that causes a compile error if any of the fundamental types or fundamental libraries are used without the "private" scope.

It's that simple: the fundamental language types, and the basic language libraries, do not, and let me repeat that, do not represent any concepts that your application actually needs. At best they represent bizzare oversimplifications of those concepts that can't be told apart by the type checking mechanism.