Geekality » Books

Test-Driven Development: By Example

Torleif — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:36:16 +0000

I earlier wrote about the book, The Art of Unit Testing, which I finished a while ago. That book was very good and was focused on how to write good unit tests. It also mentioned Test-Driven Development, TDD, but not too much. The book I read next, which I finished a few days ago, was kind of the other way around. Pretty much only about TDD. And from the title, Test-Driven Development: By Example, that shouldn’t be much of a shocker

The book is written by Kent Beck and explains the basics about TDD. It does this pretty well, step by step, by example, just like the title says. The book also talks some about TDD in a more general sense. What it is, how it works, why it works, et cetera.

From the back-cover:

Readers will learn to:

Solve complicated tasks, beginning with the simple and proceeding to the more complex.

Write automated tests before coding.

Grow a design organically by refactoring to add design decisions one at a time.

Create tests for more complicated logic, including reflection and exceptions.

Use patterns to decide what tests to write.

Create tests using xUnit, the architecture at the heart of many programmer-oriented testing tools.

It pretty much kept the promises The only part I didn’t really like about this book was that I found much of the coding kind of messy. Could be because the languages used in the examples are Java and Python, which I don’t really like that much syntax-wise. An even more important reason though, is that I just finished reading The Art of Unit Testing So, I suppose I have become a bit demanding when it comes to cleanliness when coding and writing unit-tests. I suppose that is a good thing (I do however not claim in any way that the code I currently write is extremely clean in any way! But I do strive for it to be so )

I can really recommend this book to anyone who are curious to get familiar with TDD. I certainly see the value of doing TDD and is in the process of trying to incorporate it into my development habits.

Red — Write a little test that doesn’t work, and perhaps doesn’t even compile at first.

Green — Make the test work quicky, committing whatever sins necessary in the process.

Refactor — Eliminate all of the duplication created in merely getting the test to work.

Red/green/refactor — the TDD mantra.

You can get it at Amazon, and probably a lot of other places too as it is a pretty well-known book.

The Art of Unit Testing

Torleif — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:04:42 +0000

Have you gone through three years of computer science bachelor degree fun (or anything similar) and pretty much not heard a word about testing? Or have you heard from all your teachers that testing is extremely important, but never learned how to even write one? That has been the case for me. Testing is important, you all got to do it, it is very important, always test, do it a lot! Well, sure… but how do I do it? How do I write one of these tests?

The last book I finished is called The Art of Unit Testing, and I am so happy that I stumbled over that book. Spring 2009 I was at a developer conference called NDC 2009 (Norwegian Developer Conference) and it was really great. If you have the time, you should go to that website and have a look. You can watch most of the talks there online. Anyways, the second day I attended a series of talks about Test Driven Development with a great speaker called Roy Osherove. I learned a bunch and decided that TDD looks like something I should try to learn. However, I had a big problem. I didn’t even know how to write a test. And doing TDD without knowing how to write a test is kind of difficult… to say the least…

Anyways, this Roy Osherove person advertised that he had just finished a book about pretty much exactly that; writing unit tests. So, I decided to get myself a copy of it.

It was great! Seriously learned a lot. It covers the following subjects (yes, that would be the table of contents).

The basics of unit testing
A first unit test
Using stubs to break dependencies
Interaction testing using mock objects
Isolation (mock object) frameworks
Test hierarchies and organization
The pillars of good tests
Integrating unit testing into the organization
Design and testability (Appendix A)
Extra tools and frameworks (Appendix B)

It is only 283 pages long (including the appendixes) and a pretty quick and easy read. Which I like. I got sucked in, and it was finished fast. Probably should read it again some time But anyways: I previously did not even know how to write a single unit test in any language. Now I do

You can get it from for example Manning (who is the publisher) or from Amazon. I would probably get it from Amazon since they seem to have a 34% discount currently… Except I already have it, of course

If you want to learn how to do unit testing, I can recommend it with all my heart

Oh, by the way, when you buy this book, you even get a free eBook version of it! Which is totally brilliant, since then you can have the book and read it at home, but you can also for example put the eBook version on your netbook and read while travelling. Awesome all the way Wish more publishers or authors (or whoever decides) were like that…

Wild at Heart

Torleif — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:58:45 +0000

The other day I started reading a book called Wild at Heart. So far it has been a great book and fun to read. Certain things has already started to make a bit more sense than they did before.

Two of the many very interesting paragraphs from it:

There are three desires I find written so deeply into my heart I know now I can no longer disregard them without losing my soul. They are core to who and what I am and yearn to be. I gaze into boyhood, I search the pages of literature, I listen carefully to many, many men, and I am convinced these desires are universal, a clue into masculinity itself. They may be misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected, but in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. I want o you think of the films men love, the things they do with their free time, and especially the aspirations of little boys and see if I am not right on this.

There are also three desires that I have found essential to a woman’s heart, which are not entirely different from a man’s and yet they remain distinctly feminine. Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman years to fought for. Listen to the longing of a woman’s heart: She wants to be more than noticed—she wants to be wanted. … Every woman also wants an adventure to share. … So many men make the mistake of thinking that the woman is the adventure. But that is where the relationship immediately goes downhill. A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up into something greater than herself. … And finally, every woman wants to have a beauty to unveil. Not to conjure, but to unveil. Most women feel the pressure to be beautiful from very young, but that is not what I speak of. There is also a deep desire to simply and truly be the beauty, and be delighted in.

OK, actually that last one is three paragraphs in the book. But tried to get the similar three points that was mentioned for men (And for men they are each elaborated in three sub chapters).

Aaaanyways, very interesting book. You should definitely read it, especially if you are a guy. Could be interesting if you are a woman too of course, but I can only speak for myself, who is a guy. For women there is actually a similar book called Captivating, which I have heard is very good as well. I haven’t read it yet though… but I will

Highly recommend them! Get them from Amazon, they are not even expensive

What do you think about this matter? Did it sound about right? What is in the innermost parts of your heart?