The Art Of Unit Testing: With Examples In .NET (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
This title has been crossing my path for a number of years now, mainly through Amazon recommendations, and now also Goodreads recommendations. The second edition has been released a few months ago, and so I finally decided to purchase it and see whether I could learn anything from it. I have been a practitioner for many years, and felt that I have mastered the art, but if I learned anything from my years of experience, is that "there is always room for improvement".Turns out that Osherove's book did not teach me anything new after all. The theory, techniques, and tools that the author outlined in his book I have developed myself through years of experimentation, failures, and research. If anything, I feel that the author could have expanded his title to cover additional subjects. For instance, anyone interested in mastering the art of unit testing would undoubtedly benefit to learn of patterns to manage a library of hand-coded stubs or stub factories that will certainly grow as the system gains more features and units that need to be tested. How to build stubs, for instance; how to organize them for maximum reusability and minimum duplication and management? Should one draw on the dubiously-named Object Mother pattern outlined by Martin Fowler perhaps, or maybe the Builder pattern?This is not to say that this title is useless. Osherove progresses the subject in a highly approachable manner that will be quite helpful to a beginner. The author explains concepts and theory, and provides concrete code examples which encourage experimentation, and aid the learning process. Anyone starting with unit testing, or struggling with finding the optimal approach to unit testing, will most certainly benefit from this book. As usual, books on software development get outdated very fast. Lots of the information in this book is still applicable, but in terms of the portrayed frameworks, a lot has happened. I'm excited about the second version of the same book that came out late last year. Apart from framework issues, this book is a great overview of testing techniques and design principles. Had I read this book earlier on, I may have been able to rectify the situation (lack of tests, project tending to failure) on a past project....
What do You think about The Art Of Unit Testing: With Examples In .NET (2009)?
it takes me from novice to intermediate level simply by only reading 60% of this book
—Stephanie
Wrote a review on my blog and posted on Amazon
—matt
