Ask YC: Good agile book?
I'm outside of Amazon coverage right now, but I'm going in there soon. What is the one book on agile development I should get? Also, how good is agile for teams of 2 or individuals?
Agile rocks for small teams. Set up a work queue (backlog) and an iteration size (how often you want to build/release). Then just start pulling things off the queue and putting them into your releases.
If you get caught up in the details, you've missed the point. Agile is about flexibility and adaptation -- a team of two guys should be very flexible.
E-mail me if you run into any snags.
But it depends if you are interested in pure methodology, or you want to see some example of applying it in software/Web development with PHP/Java/RoR/...
From my experience, I found helpful next books:
"Test Driven Development: By Example" by Kent Beck
"Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices" by Robert C. Martin
"Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman
"Agile Project Management with Scrum" by Ken Schwaber
"Agile Software Development Ecosystems" by Jim Highsmith
Those are pretty "technology independent". Helpful to understand the idea. And the authors are respected and well known in the community of agile developers.
If you work with RoR (which is popular choice nowadays) you may find "Agile Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Hansson interesting, but it does not cover "agile methodology" itself too wide. But it does give a good overview of practical usage. Anyhow, personally I still prefer to learn theory before practice, but many people see it working for them ;-)
As for individuals it works, but you'll have to pick out the parts that you really could make use of and leave other parts to the wayside.
I'd say it helps organize your project but it all comes down to you being disciplined. For that Agile isn't going to help much.