Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook

by Ian Langworth, chromatic, Chromatic

Book Overview

Is there any sexier topic in software development than software testing? That is, besides game programming, 3D graphics, audio, high-performance clustering, cool websites, et cetera? Okay, so software testing is low on the list. And that's unfortunate, because good software testing can increase your productivity, improve your designs, raise your quality, ease your maintenance burdens, and help to satisfy your customers, coworkers, and managers.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596100922
• ISBN13: 9780596100926
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book

Love this book, excellent intro to Perl testing. One of the few (or only) books on Perl testing out there. Not sure what the people who gave it a low rating would've recommended instead - there are some web docs out there but they are all by chromatic too. Contents include the following: Test::More, Dest::Deep, test_ok, cmp_deeply, is, Devel::Cover, Test::Harness, Mock modules, program testing, testing databases and Apache, and much more. Fairly easy to follow. If you program seriously in Perl, but need to learn more about testing, this is the book to have.

This is a great Perl testing book

If you have never been involved in testing your Perl stuff this book lets you know just about everything that you would want to know. Being new to Perl, this book told me everything I wanted to know about testing my Perl programs. If you are already testing your Perl programs, this book may give you some ideas or get you thinking about different ways to test. If you have never tested your Perl programs before, this book is a fantastic resource.

Finally a Practical Guide to Perl Testing

You'll read this book cover-to-cover. It's easy, it's concise, it's fun and it will change your testing attitude. You'll be inspired immediately, roll up your sleeves and get started. Sure, Ian Langworth and chromatic could have written a 700-page reference tome on all the different testing modules available and how to use every single feature. Instead, they just show you what expert perl programmers do when they're testing their work. They're getting you 90% there. If you need more, it's easy to pick up the details from the manual pages of the various testing modules, most of which come with excellent documentation. The value of this book is that it shows you what's available and covers an astonishing amount of different use cases. O'Reilly's "Developer's Notebook" style is somewhat unusual, very FAQ-like. The only gripe I have with this series are recurring headlines like "How do I do that?" and "What just happened?", which I'd rather like to be replaced by pictograms. Summary: I strongly recommend this book if you want to improve the quality of your code by verifying it thoroughly. Using the recipes in "Perl Testing" takes the unsexyness out of Quality Assurance.

DIVING FOR PERL

Learning how Perl's test tools work and how to put them together to solve all sorts of previously intractable problems can make you a better programmer in general. Authors Ian Langworth and chromatic have done an outstanding job of putting together a book that shows you how easy it is to use the Perl tools described therein, to handle all sorts of testing problems you might encounter. Langworth and chromatic begin by explaining everything you need to start writing and running tests, including how to install testing modules, how to understand test results, and the basic test functions you'll use in every test. Next, the authors demonstrate further test techniques and modules. Then, they explain how to take advantage of the basic testing tools, so that you can customize them for your environment and projects. The authors continue by covering some of the issues you'll face when you want to distribute your project, especially the issues of non-code portions of your project. In addition, the authors next recommend another way of thinking that allows you to substitute testable code for code that otherwise looks untestable. They also focus on simple and effective techniques to verifying that your code does what it should. The authors next explore an alternative web application design strategy that makes projects easier to maintain and easier to test; as well as, how to test them. Next, the authors discuss a Perl testing framework that allows good code reuse within object-oriented project tests and yet works within the familiar Perl testing libraries. Finally, they suggest a few ways to use everything you've learned to test other projects written in other languages. With the preceding in mind, the authors have done an excellent job in this book of showing you how to go forth and improve software quality worldwide. At the end of the day, after reading this book, you'll want to do your job of testing a little bit better.

Pragmatic guide to Perl testing

Like most of the Notebook series this is a short rocket ride though a series of topics. But this book is written well enough that the flow of test driven development for every type of code will work for an experienced Perl programmer. The book covers the fundamentals of test driven development. It also covers database code testing, and web app testing through robots. An excellent book on Perl and a great addition to the set of O'Reilly Perl books. While you are looking you should also check out "Perl Best Practices", which is phenomenal.