Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook

By Ian Langworth, chromatic
July 2005
Pages: 200
Series: Developer's Notebooks
ISBN 10: 0-596-10092-2 | ISBN 13: 9780596100926
(5) (Average of 1 Customer Reviews)

Description

Good software testing can increase your productivity, improve your designs, raise your quality, and make you more productive overall. With this series of hands-on labs, you'll learn how Perl's test tools work and how to use them to create basic and complex tests and interpret your results. Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook is ideal if you want to reduce your software development cycle times.
Full Description

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.

Perl has a strong history of automated tests. A very early release of Perl 1.0 included a comprehensive test suite, and it's only improved from there. 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. Besides, it's easy to use the Perl tools described to handle all sorts of testing problems that you may encounter, even in other languages.

Like all titles in O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series, this "all lab, no lecture" book skips the boring prose and focuses instead on a series of exercises that speak to you instead of at you.

Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook will help you dive right in and:

Write basic Perl tests with ease and interpret the results
Apply special techniques and modules to improve your tests
Bundle test suites along with projects
Test databases and their data
Test websites and web projects
Use the "Test Anything Protocol" which tests projects written in languages other than Perl

With today's increased workloads and short development cycles, unit tests are more vital to building robust, high-quality software than ever before. Once mastered, these lessons will help you ensure low-level code correctness, reduce software development cycle time, and ease maintenance burdens.

You don't have to be a die-hard free and open source software developer who lives, breathes, and dreams Perl to use this book. You just have to want to do your job a little bit better.

Featured customer reviews

Testing should be fun, May 24 2009

Rating:

Submitted by Kiffin Gish [Respond | View]

Excellent overview and introduction to the art of testing Perl programs. This modestly-sized book covers a wide range of types of testing from the very simple Perl script to the more advanced web application. It's not only about writing tests but managing them as well and then making sure that your code can be distributed in a useful manner. I especially found the chapter about testing untestable code very insightful, where the use of mocking modules and mocking objects is essential. Have you ever needed to override live code by hacking deeply into their packages? Well, this book will help you out with this delicate matter and make you more confident with testing, testing and testing. Most people have an aversion to testing, but here you can get quickly up to speed and even enjoy the fine are of testing. There are many references to other CPAN modules which is useful to know about. Of course, any book authored by chromatic has to be worth the read.

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Media reviews
"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."
-- Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author", Amazon.com

"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...At the end of the day, after reading this book, you'll want to do your job of testing a little bit better."
-- John Vacca, Amazon.com

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"An excellent book on Perl and a great addition to the set of O'Reilly Perl books."
--Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author", Amazon.com