Torn between a 3 or a 4. This is a good book for the beginner. I feel the book may be a little outdated. I expected a little more in-depth detail from an entire book about user stories.

Works well both as an introduction to agile practices with a focus on user stories and I can strongly recommend it if you are new to Agile as a whole.
Works very well also in case you have experience with agile practices, but less theoretical background on why certain practices work the way they do, I also recommend if you have previous experience in Agile, software development or project management.

Very well written and easy to follow.

A good book on User Stories but I found it lacking on how to approach and manage non functional aspects of software development....which may be appropriate if stories aren't the best way but more comment would have been useful.

Unfortunately the material in the book is showing its age, and is in strong need of a refresh in 2021. The concepts are solid and as a very basic introduction to product owner activities it stands up and is reasonably practical. Where it misses is in covering the actual practice of writing user stories in greater depth with more complex examples such as writing stories in regulated environments, managing technical activities that are too large to be sub tasks and so on.

Great read, a complete insight into user stories with questions and an example project !! What else could you ask for ....

Easy to read book, but like so many agile books, the concepts that it presents are so relatively straight forward that it starts to feel kind of repetitive as each point is elaborated again and again.

I enjoyed this book about user stories. It is a thorough look at why we break down development projects into stories and how they can be used. I particularly appreciated the concept of personas 'as a sales manager I want to track sales in realtime'. Towards the end there is a small introduction on XP as a coding style that I found fun. All in all a good if unremarkable read

I recently learned a fundamental dichotomy in expressing oneself: you use either the 'esoteric' or the 'exoteric' mode. (The exoteric writer says exactly what she means, minimises ambiguity and tries to do everything with explicit reasoning, for the largest audience they can, with imagery and irony only as decoration. The esoteric writer – distinct from, but often coextensive with the woo-woo mystical metaphysics fans also called esoteric – does the converse.

Most ancient writers wrote esoterically, which is one reason that undergrads and other fools, like me, think that ancient writers are vague and low on content. Up to now, I have been confusing the rhetorical stance - see Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Caputo - with the magickal crap. But so much of the Analytic / Continental divide can be explained in this single distinction! [The revival of the distinction is due to that lionized demon Leo Strauss.] Maths is an interesting border case, but its clarity and attempt to destroy ambiguity make it exoteric, I think.)

The exoteric intention strikes me as firstly just good manners and important for intellectual honesty (accountability, critical clarity). But one thing I dislike about studying computer science is that all the materials are utterly exoteric. I crave art and irreverence in formal contexts, and those are always at least somewhat esoteric. The ‘Agile’ software thing strikes me as good, a way of making the hag-ridden and monstrously expensive dev process work. But all the material around Agile, LEAN (and the wider business-marketing-HR-systems theory blah that represents most employed adults’ only engagement with passably academic work) is so exoteric that something in me rebels.

This book is a masterpiece must read. It is a bit old and way long. I bet you will gain some and may be a lot of knowledge along the way.

Mike Cohn is one of my favorite authors - and speakers. This is again a thought-provoking piece of work on requirements gathering and project steering.

I liked this book. I didn't love it, but I liked it. If you are new in the world of user story writing and in agile software development, this book is a great starting point. If, however, you are already familiar with user stories and/or you are a more experienced product owner or scrum master, then I would suggest either Mike Cohn's Better User Stories training (which touches most of the topics of this book, but goes into more detail and is more up to date), or Agile Estimating and Planning (the absolute must-read for any Product Owner, imho).

This book has largely become unnecessary since it's initial publication. The contents are still accurate and relevant, but an hour or two on Google and Wikipedia (or a couple of days attending agile ceremonies) will entirely preclude the need to read this book.