Test Driven Development: A Practical Guide (Coad)

After receiving a brief introduction to TDD at university I realized the tremendous benefits that this technique has. I also realized that there were gaps in my knowledge of TDD and so I decided to buy this book to brush up on it.

The book did answer many questions I had of how to best to use TDD, as well as showing me the wonderful extensions and tools that exist for JUnit.

I do have some quibbles with the book however. For starters, the author seems to use methods before hes written them. Leaving me to look back through the book to see if ive missed something. He tells us that there may be some bits missing and that we can go to the printed URL to download the full sorce code. However this link is broken and there are no responses to my e-mails to find out where it is. This is very frustrating but shouldn't prevent you from absorbing what needs to be absorbed.

If you can ignore these mistakes, this book will greatly benefit your understanding of this most useful of software engineering techniques.

Will take you beyond basic JUnitting (3/3 people found this helpful)

Plenty of books give an introduction to Test Driven Development, but don't get a lot further than explaining JUnit and giving a few examples. While this is helpful, they offer little more than what can be gleaned by scouring the internet.

On the other hand, you may be wondering if you can manage a book devoted entirely to TDD, which can easily devolve into walk throughs of frameworks for applications irrelevant to your needs, which is mainly: given that you're persuaded TDD is a good idea, how do you go about doing it for more than trivial examples?

This book comes up with the goods. As expected, there's an introduction to agile techniques, and an overview of JUnit, but this goes further, and gives an overview of several JUnit extensions, which is very helpful for those seeking ways to extend their testing.

The other two important introductory chapters are on Mock objects and testing GUIs. The section on mock objects is useful (and rarely touched upon in more introductory texts), although I would say that the treatment by Johannes Link in Unit Testing In Java (which has a similar scope) is better.

The really great part of this book, however, is the 200 page step-by-step tutorial in TDD with JUnit, building a simple GUI application for storing films, and their reviews and rating. The conversational tone of the writing is very effective in illustrating the decisions in how to decide what to test next, and how to do it. If you don't 'get' TDD, this section is a must-read and the most valuable part of the book.

Jeff Langr's Agile Java very successfully covers a lot of the ground in this book, but also attempts to teach Java 5.0 at the same time, so this book is more focussed. It's probably not essential reading if you've read Langr's book, but this book does cover more.

If you've also read Unit Testing in Java (or have read that book and are wondering if you should pick this one up too), then you probably don't need to read both. Either one should suit your needs admirably. There is perhaps not enough difference between them to justify getting both, but if money is no object, then they complement each other well - Link's book covers more applications (e.g. databases, networks, web servers), and is better for its treatment of mock objects, while this book has more depth on testing GUIs and JUnit extensions and unit testing frameworks in other languages.

Very Useful (4/4 people found this helpful)

Excellent book. Not only is it highly practical but its highly researched and thus provides lots of insights that other TDD books simply dont have.

Its also worth noting that although this book concentrates on Java its actually still worth getting if your a C# developer (as I am).

A hands-on guid showing you the way... (1/2 people found this helpful)

This Book covers test-first development, its tools and methods in both in such a way that one can either just skim thru it getting the broad outline and some ideas or really get stuck into it and viewing a entire new world of possibilities.
It is as the title claims a practical guide recommendable to everyone who is either learning to programm or wants to refine his/her skills.
Combined with M Fowler's "Refactoring - Improving the design of existing code" a must for programmers who put good code first.
If you are not so deeply into the idea of tdd then this book is still humorous enough for a read and maybe it will show a new way.
UCL2003

A book showing you the way... (2/4 people found this helpful)

This book is like its title claims a practical guid to TDD and its tools, if you just skim thru the book to get a broad outline and perhaps some ideas, or if you read it in depth where it shows you an entire new world.
This book combined with Fowler's Refactoring is a must for every OO programmer and those who want to learn it.
In its highly amusing but yet clear sort of way it makes it easy to get the ideas and points easily helping you to create good code.
Personaly I was abit scepical at first but after reading it and using the methods in my projects I can only recommend to read it.

Test Driven Development: A Practical Guide (Coad)

David Astels

Reader Reviews:

Good, but needs a second edition (1/1 people found this helpful)

Will take you beyond basic JUnitting (3/3 people found this helpful)

Very Useful (4/4 people found this helpful)

A hands-on guid showing you the way... (1/2 people found this helpful)

A book showing you the way... (2/4 people found this helpful)

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