I burned through the XP pocket guide in short order, and plan to go back over it a few times. The introduction is encouraging -- I was worried that picking up a 'pocket guide' would somehow be treating myself to an incomplete, detailless explanation, but it doesn't seem to be the case, and it's a good read.
Having said all that -- and along with the encouragement recieved from said guide indicating that customer contact is a good, good thing -- I have decided I need to actually ask chromatic what's intended to happen with the attack phase. The customer tests are a little unclear about this, indicating that regeneration needs to occur before the attack, but that the attack cannot do more damage than the computer's got resistance at the time, etc. and I can't quite get it to work out.
I have gotten the hang of writing tests before writing the code, and there's definately a rhythm there -- write test, run test, see test fail, rewrite code until it passes...rinse, repeat, etc. A few little things I've done with PFE have made this a one-click-per-step operation -- run all the tests, rebuild, etc., all automated. I was pretty happy with how quick it got.
I'm too tired to try right now, and I should probably do it on the xp training site chromatic set up -- but I need to remember to ask, I need to remember to ask.
December...man, I just feel like I haven't slept at all. I've got a little extra book money, so I'm probably going to snag some more books. I got a half-gig Disk-on-key, so I'm starting to pile my favorite stuff (PFE, bunch of templates I set up in PFE, a working copy of my entire little dev directory, etc.) and a copy of Beyond Good And Evil (the game, not the book by Nietzche). I'm so, so tired. I feel like I never stopped having to shop. Next year is not going to be like this, even if I have to kill half of my family or something. It's just not worth the effort.
I've never been so happy to sleep.
