My agile canon

As much as I enjoy reading blog posts, they cannot match the sustained argument from a well-written book. Fortunately, the agile movement has many articulate advocates who have been busy committing their thoughts to paper (and eReader) over the past few years.

Here are some agile books that I recommend:

• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck is the original XP manifesto.
  
• The Art of Agile Development by James Shore is a comprehensive reference for agile/XP.
  
• Clean Code by Uncle Bob is a detailed manual for producing high quality code, right down to variable naming.
  
• The Art of Unit Testing (with examples in .NET) by Roy Osherove is the only good book I've found specifically on unit testing.
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers is an interesting guide to bringing legacy code under test and under control.
• I'm currently reading Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn, which covers story points, sprint length, agile planning and a lot of other topics that are important for management to understand as well as developers.
• Two very reputable books on use cases and user stories are Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn and User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn, but I've read neither (yet).

The exciting thing about reading these books is that they are part of an ongoing conversation. We haven't worked out how to build software well yet, but I think that these books bring us a little closer.