Pragmatic Unit Testing [Book review]

Title: Pragmatic Unit Testing
Subtitle: In C# with NUnit
Series: The Pragmatic Starter Kit – Volume II
Edition: 2nd – Covers NUnit 2.4
Publisher: The Pragmatic Programmers

Authors:
Andrew Hunt
David Thomas
With Matt Hargett

ISBN-10: 0-9776166-7-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-9776166-7-1

I always get a delight when reading books from the Pragmatic Programmers series. They have a tendency to be light-easy reads that nevertheless manage to hammer home the key points and touch on modern techniques and tool to boot. Pragmatic Unit Testing In C# with NUnit is no exception.

This book is the C# edition of the second volume in the Pragmatic Starter Kit series which aims to teach those things that anyone in the Software industry should know, but which seems to somehow be consistently absent from university courses. The other volumes cover Version Control and Automation.

The book does cover the NUnit framework quite well but the content is not focussed on the tool so much as it is on the techniques and philosophies of unit testing.

• How do you decide what to test?


• How you decide you’ve tested enough?


• How does good design promote testability and how do you test code which is tightly coupled?


• How do I test the user interface?


• How do I organize my project to effectively leverage unit testing?

All of these topics are tackled by this book. I would recommend this book to anyone who was interested in learning about unit testing or any self-taught unit-testers who wonder if they are doing it right. For the more experienced unit-tester, you might find a folden nugget of info here but your best use of this book is to refer graduate programmers to it. I’d be surprised if the entire series doesn’t comprise a uni course somewhere.

You can get the book from the publisher here: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/utc2

Or straight from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Unit-Testing-Nunit-Programmers/dp/0974514020

Disclosure: The Perth .NET User Group is a member of the O'Reilly User Group and Professional Association Program. O’Reilly make copies of their books available for user group libraries, and the copy reviewed here was kindly donated by O’Reilly.