Summary: Jerry Weinberg has written a lot of books and articles that have influenced and taught generations of people in the IT world. Some of whom have written brief essays, collated in this volume, which exhort the reader to read the books of Gerald Weinberg and Virginia Satir.

I have many books on my “I really must read that list”. So many in fact, that I don’t buy them all. I rely to a great extent on my library, synchronicity and coincidence to feed my reading habit. Fortunately I received an offer to borrow this book. I did borrow it, but could I justify buying it? …

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Book Authors: Alan Page, Ken Johnston, Bj Rollison

I really enjoyed this book. I don't know if I learned a lot of new stuff but HWTSAM did remind me of a lot, and encouraged me to believe in a rosier future for all software testers.

HWTSAM makes it clear that because of Microsoft's size many styles of testing go on in Microsoft and this book presents some stories about Microsoft and some of their techniques. No company I have worked for has faced, has not even close to, the same testing problems as Microsoft. Microsoft builds and tests for the long term. No company I have worked in has built for the long term - if a product takes a few years to write and then lives on in support for 10 years, and you have a company culture that acknowledges that from the outset, then the development process changes wildly - and you get the Microsoft approach.

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I titled this as "mini book review" because I do not have much to say. This book has one aim - to help you pass the ISEB Foundation exam. I think the book achieves this aim. So if you want an easy preparatory route to sitting and passing the ISEB foundation exam then reading this book and filling your head with its words and definitions should lead to a pass.

Sadly, I do not consider that as a glowing book reference.

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Subtitled "TestNG and Advanced Concepts" and written by the people behind TestNG, I picked up this book expecting to read a definitive and encyclopedic work on TestNG. However, the authors decry this view in the preface. This book takes 'testing' as its focus and uses TestNG to illustrate the examples. (Although it does really start off as  "a book about TestNG").

So prior to reading the book my experience of TestNG amounted to the following:

• read some of the tests people had written using TestNG at work
• amended some of the tests
• hacked about with the testng.xml file
• fixed some tests
• gone to the website to learn a little more about some of the annotations and the xml file
• Read, and used, the examples on the home page
• Run tests and suites within Eclipse
• Skimmed the documentation

So, as a beginner I felt like I could already 'use' TestNG, but I didn't really understand some of the concepts 'properly' like dataproviders - sure I could write one, but I didn't really 'get' all the nuances. Hence the reason for reading this book.

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Whoop, Yeah, Time to get funky!

I had not visited the O'Reilly land of "Head Rush" or "Head First" prior to this book. I have seen this series hyped and been told by people that "these books are great!"

And maybe the people saying that really believed it.

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This book only has 120 or so pages and has the purpose of introducing the reader to JMeter. I haven't found the online documentation for JMeter an easy read - mainly because I could not find a nice easy to print or flip through pdf version. The online document serves a reference rather than a hand holding purpose.  Hence the need for this book.

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I avoided using JQuery in my test pack for as long as I could, to try and learn a little about JavaScript the hard way. But I just could not get my button clicking test working cross browser. But clever JavaScript ninjas invented libraries like JQuery to help with exactly that type of problem so...

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The Ajax world moves really quickly, and has moved on a lot since the publication of this book, so much so that it could really do with a new edition. Fortunately, with the sub title "A Web 2.0 Primer", we should expect an overview, and in some ways it doesn't matter that we don't get the most up to date information.

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In the foreword Robert Martin tells us that other patterns exist for preventing bad code, and this this book helps us reverse the rot, to "...turn systems that gradually degrade into systems that gradually improve."

Since the provided definition of "Legacy code" describes "code without tests", you can apply the approaches presented at any point in a project where you discover that the code does not have tests. And depending on the level of 'rot' you can pick and choose from the various techniques presented.

[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

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Manning Publications have a competition to win some free e-books.

Manning say they will give away 2 free e-books every day until 30th April.

Do you feel lucky?