The book begins with a section on philoshopies, but philosophies as they relate directly to a set of practices, not abract or nebulous philosophies.
The remainder of the book describes a set of concrete practices that can be applied to the development process, and then to actual code construction. These are not values or abstract philosophies, but pragmatic things that can be done one at a time or in concert to improve a software project.
What isn’t covered in the book (explicitly so) are project management or scheduling methodologies. All of the pragmatic pratcies covered in this book will work just as well for a RUP or waterfall project as they would for an XP or Scrum project. The focus will be explicitly on practical things that can be implemented to incrementally improve both the process and development skills of individual developers or their teams, all of which has been learned from years of real-world experience on small to medium sized software teams working in an agile way.
