I’ve just made public a beta version of my “Selenium Simplified” book.

I still have work to do on it, so I have released it as a beta book in pdf format as an ebook (e-book ?), and at a bargain price too.

This means that:

• it costs much less than it will when I finish it.
• it may change a little before the final release.

I still need to write sections to cover CSS locators, and a bit more on JUnit (suites, command line usage, CI Integration). But the main sections exist (210 A4 pages of it, in fact).

I have written it as a tutorial so it walks the reader through everything the need to help them learn how to use Selenium for automation, using Java.

So this isn’t to teach the reader how to use the IDE (but I do cover that), this is to get the reader programming their automated tests in Java.

I wrote it for the beginner. So I assume no knowledge of programming or automated testing.

I started writing “Selenium Simplified” because at every conference I go to, I meet numerous people who tell me that they are not technical enough to do automation, or that they just don’t understand the articles on the web or in magazines about automation when code appears.

For some reason people freeze when faced with a blank window in an programming IDE and don’t know how to write code.

Others have written programming and automation books aimed at the beginner tester before:

• Visual Basic for Testers, by Mary Sweeny
• Everyday Scripting with Ruby, by Brian Marick

So in the grand tradition of trying to make it easier for testers to start automating, I wrote “Selenium Simplified” 

Check the “Selenium Simplified” advertorial page, to see just how cheap I’ve made it for you to start learning how to automate web testing.

Of the 15 names in the list I recognised just 7, so I can't claim to have a great knowledge of great programmers. But that just seeing Donald Knuth on the list made me want to read the book. And having read it, I recommend it to you.

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

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Note: I've had to really reign myself in on this review so I don't savage the book. A lot of people have contributed to this book, and I assume they all worked hard. But I did not enjoy this book. I feel sad that I can not show this book any affection. Instead I recommend you read Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory's "Agile Testing" instead.

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One good thing about the title, it should mean that testers read the book. One bad thing about the title, other roles might not. But they should. This book provides a particularly good introduction and overview to the Agile process from a ‘test’ perspective.

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

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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? …

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

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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.

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

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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.

[ amazon.co.uk | amazon.com ]

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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.

( amazon.co.uk | amazon.com )

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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.

amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

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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.

amazon.co.uk | amazon.com

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