Test-Driven Development: A J2EE Example

Rating:
Summary: Extensive problems and answers
Review: Hammell puts forth to us that testing code is a rigorous discipline. He explains how to do this in the context of writing Java and using J2EE. The bedrock of his exposition is unit testing. This being Java, he shows how JUnit can be used to configure and run such tests, in a highly automated fashion. Hopefully, you will agree with his contention that indeed integrating JUnit and unit testing into the overall fabric of your development process is easy.

Building on this, he treats the important cases of testing a Java GUI and servlets and JSPs. The basic ideas are easy to grasp. There is a mass of example code that might obscure it, on first glance. But part of your skill set, which you need to develop, is that you should be able to hone down through the source code for the essential implementation of the ideas.

A nice trait of the book is the problem sets. And the lengthy answers to them. Rather unusual in books of these type. Typically, there aren't even any problems furnished. Let alone answers. If you end up using this book, you should avail yourself of the problems, for better learning.



Rating:
Summary: Decent book with good examples. Worth buying
Review: Overall I really liked this book. It has a lot good examples and practical advice on how to use TDD to build a J2EE application. The code I downloaded from the book's web site is nice also because besides the source code for the book you get a full build environment including a set of Ant build files that can be used to easily build and the run the examples. I really liked the chapter on servlet development using TDD since it showed me some tools and techniques that I hadn't seen before.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting case study in TDD
Review: This is an interesting book. It takes a case study approach to teaching test driven development on an application to track sports results. It's pretty code heavy, which is something that I don't like about it. But given the topic that is to be expected.

Test Driven Development is a tough topic to teach. I respect APress for publishing a book with a unique design to try address this problem. It's well worth the time because this unique development approach can be very powerful when it's employed properly.

I recommend looking into Test Driven Development if you haven't already. And this is a reasonable place to start if you like to learn by example more than by reading process documentation like the Agile books.