Two book reviews

Test driven development: by example (Kent Beck)

An easy read (also quite thin). Didn't learn too much new but the later sections/appendixes that list refactoring patterns were quite interesting (I hadn't read about them before but I sure recognised some of them!).

Growing object-oriented software, guided by tests (Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce)

Sometimes a tad theoretic, sometimes a tad too practical. The automated testing of the user interface (reading value of label for example) is too extreme for my tastes but it was impressive to see it done. Great book to learn about mocking and mock objects! After all, Steve and Nat helped build jmock. It also expanded my ideas of TDD. I was to focused on unit tests but this book broadened my scope to include tests at every level and not to get too hung up with terminology.

Birthday greeting kata in C# .Net

One of the katas that I have recently had the pleasure of finding and trying out is the birthday greeting kata by Matteo Vaccari. It's a great exercise in what I have termed "refounding" of existing software (see an earlier post). Here is an opportunity to take existing code, refactor, and add unit tests.

Now I'm no java expert and although I had fun playing around with Eclipse, I felt more like a toddler learning to take it's first steps than a kung fu code master (not that I am that either mind you). So I decided to have some fun and port the code to C# .Net. If you're interested you can find it here (Visual Studio 2008 unit testing).

Have fun :-)