Review of JUnit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing by J. B. Rainsberger

Tuesday, 14 February 2006

When I discovered an obvious naming error in one of the early examples, I was immediately concerned about the level of proofreading that was done before publication of this book. However, I am glad to say that my concerns were unnecessary; there are no mistakes of any significance anywhere in the book.

The book is laid out into a series of chapters describing related techniques, such as "working with test data" and "testing web components", with each chapter split into a series of "recipes", each describing a particular technique. The layout of each recipe is good, with a problem statement, additional background, the details of the recipe itself, and further discussion. There are also references to other related recipes, that provide alternatives to, build on, or are relied on by this recipe.

The level of coverage is very comprehensive. Having read the book it feels like there is a recipe for testing just about everything you could write in Java, from simple classes, to XML generation code, database access code, EJBs, singletons, and JSPs. There are even recipes on managing your test suites, adding tests to hard-to-test classes, and the use of test implementations of other objects to allow testing objects in isolation.

Just because it focuses on Java and JUnit does not mean that this book is useless to anyone programming in another language. On the contrary, many of the techniques described can be applied in any Object Oriented language, though there are certainly some that are specific to Java. For this reason, I would highly recommend this book not just to Java programmers, but to anyone interested in improving the testing of their code.

Highly Recommended.

Buy this book

At Amazon.co.uk
At Amazon.com

Posted by Anthony Williams
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