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Given these assumptions, what books should this person be looking at to give them the best foundation of knowledge before they begin working within an Agile team? So far, I've come up with the following somewhat meagre list:

1. Extreme Programming Explained (aka The White Book) by Kent Beck. I haven't come across a better introductory text for XP - pure and simple.
2. Test Driven Development, also by Kent Beck. TDD was a confusing blur prior to reading this book.
3. ???
4. ???
5. ???

Noteable Omissions

I should admit that although I'm a huge fan of Refactoring by Martin Fowler (as required by my employee agreement with ThoughtWorks :-)), it's not in this list because I believe refactoring and the patterns covered in this book is a concept inherently understood by most developers, although they may not have realized their murky concept of "cleaning up code" actually has a proper name.

Ditto for the rest of the books in the Extreme Programming series, which although informative, IMHO don't build upon the White Book enough to join the original text in my list.

So this leaves at least another three spaces in my list for new entries submitted by whomever so desires. What other texts do people think should be in there? Argue your case, be it for The Pragmatic Programmer, any of the books from Ward Cunningham or Ron Jeffries or even Sun Tzu and the Art of War if you want to completely underwhelm me with your Renaissance readings.

So hurry up with your suggestions. Competition closes soon. One vote per reader. No warranty either expressed or implied. Judges decision is worthless and correspondence happily entered into.

Note: I was introduced to the term "trophy book" by Gregor Hohpe, author of the recently published Enterprise Integration Patterns. Although I haven't nominated his book (or even read it for that matter), I thought I might curry some favour by citing him for the title/inspiration of this article instead.