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

I think this is a great book for those new to TDD, it's no that long so you can get through it pretty quickly and I think it does a good job of summarising the most important points.

In really simple and even humorous way Kent Beck explains the test-driven development approach. He convinced me, that it's reliable method to build powerful and dependable systems. Not only the programmer is sure, that the system is running the way it's supposed to, but also the code is kept clean and easy to maintain.

Mixed bag, the Book is great but the copy of the book I recieved is printed on some very thin paper. The size is somewhat correct but the weight is not even close to stated. In the 400g ballpark instead of 700g area. Cheaply printed pirate copy?!

As a practitioner of TDD already, I found this book to be a good refresher. I can see it working as a good introduction for TDD beginners. The book also contains some pearls of wisdom for programming in general and which add context to the teachings.

The book is very nice because it has good layout and a simple structure which every time introduces the theory of the workj case which it introduces and it very educational with its examples and tasks.

I love this book. It's written in first person which makes it an interesting read. I had fair idea about test driven development but this book took my knowledge further.

By far the best book on TDD I have read. Practical and funny.

I bought this having read Kent Beck's book on Extreme Programming in order to get more insight into Test-Driven Development, which is one of the most interesting aspects of XP to me. I'm an experienced industry practitioner and have observed or participated in a large number of reasonably big software projects. I wanted to learn more about this technique which I have not used before or been directly exposed to previously in my professional experience. It may be that Beck has a different (or wider) audience in mind in writing this book but its a little too lightweight for my liking. By his own continuous admission, the pace is very slow. Combined with the fact that the book is also quite short, the end result is that you don't get very much. On the plus side, this has had the desired effect of introducing me to the general idea and way of thinking involved in TDD and has also got me into trying CppUnit (the C++ version of JUnit) - which I've found simple to use and helpful for the design of tests. To get more practical guidance on TDD I would say Steve Freeman's and Nat Pryce's book is better because it has more practical guidance and covers a wider range of issues. I would say I also prefer their style of TDD over Beck's - the latter seems to advocate mostly unit test alone, with a very low tolerance for the time allowed between writing a (failing) test and having it pass. Freeman and Pryce talk about different levels of tests - unit, integration and end-to-end - with the higher levels allowed to contain tests more descriptive of overall functionality of the system in question and having higher test write to test pass time periods. I think this is a good way to specify slightly more larger pieces of your intended functionality and gives more structure to your design whilst still retaining great flexibility, rather than only ever thinking in terms of the most basic 'units'.