Kris’ Book Reviews

It is a book by famous extreme programming evangelist - Kent Beck, and takes the reader on a trip of early testing. The technique is called test-driven development, or test-first development.The book consists of three parts, in the first one Beck teaches us this new technique by developing a currency classes. Here we are taught step by step how to add test cases and after that, developing the code to be tested. In this part, the source code is in Java.

Horizon T73 Treadmill review - move your muscles and start jogging in-house

The next part, shows how to develop a testing framework (xUnit) by testing it first with a previous version of the same testing framework. It is an interesting approach, but somehow, it was not as interesting as the first example, maybe it was to abstract for me. This time the examples are written in Python.

And now for the real interesting part - the last part. This one consists test-driven patterns, such as red/green bar patterns, implementing design patterns etc. If you are not new to this kind of development, this part will be the most beneficial to you.

“Test-Driven Development” is well written, with a lot of humor, if you read any book by Kent Beck than you probably know this writing style. Each steps in the examples is thoroughly explained and really should make you think about giving this kind of development a try in the next project. Moreover if you know something or even develop your software this way, then the third part will show you how you could improve your techniques. The only drawback of the book is its length, it is too short. My recommendation is: buy it!.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Buy Test Driven Development: By Example (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 8:41 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Programming, Kent Beck . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.