The Art Of Unit Testing

This book is worth its weight in gold. I mention a few techniques from it in my book as well. Get it. You can thank me later.

This book is a good complement for my book. While my book is targetted more towards the beginner crowd, XUnit test patterns will be more appreciated by advanced unit testers, since it contains more “meta” like information. Funny thing is, I only read this book when I was about to finish my own, and found that both Gerard and I came across many of the same things, and named them differently.

I was honored to write a few pages for this book by uncle bob. The book talks about the “code of conduct” that he feels developers should have. How to say “yes” and “no”. How to quit your job well, and how to be happy doing what you do. I thought it was a great book, although I am hardly objective :)

I’d highly recommend this book for those who already have some experience with unit testing, as this book assumes you already have done some unit testing. Having said that, I think is book is a must read for people learning to TDD, even more so than Kent Beck’s book. I’d venture to say Kent’s bookis simplistic compared to Freeman and Price’s book. If in doubt, read both!

My book talks about unit testing, and this book talks about test driven development (when to write the tests).

This is the book I read when I was just starting out with unit testing and TDD. Today I’d recommend it to learn what “test driven” evelopment is, not what “unit testing” is. I think it makes more sense to learn unit testing well (my book) and then learn to do test driven well (that book and others). You can write crappy tests even if you write them before the code :)  Kent Beck is amazing in this book, but there are many lessons missing from it that I added in my own book, which does not teach TDD, just unit testing.

I learned a lot from this book when I was getting started in unit testing, becuase it contained some practical “how-to”s on various .net related subjects, but I feel that today it is too outdated. some of the things I talk about in my book are “fixes” to things I’ve read in this book, for example, testing data related stuff, I talk about rolling back the changes in a simpler way than the older book introduced.