Archive for the 'Book Reviews' Category

Book Review: Coders at Work by Peter Seibel

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 )

Book Review: Agile Testing by John Watkins

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 [...]

Book Review: Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

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 )

Book Review: The Gift of Time, edited by Fiona Charles

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 [...]

Book Review: How We Test Software At Microsoft

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 [...]

Mini Book Review: Software Testing An ISEB Foundation by Brian Hambling (editor)

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 Review: Next Generation Java Testing by Cedric Beust and Hani Suleiman

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 [...]

Book Review: Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin

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

Book Review: Apache JMeter by Emily H. Halili

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 [...]

Book Review: Pragmatic Ajax – A Web 2.0 Primer by Gehtland, Galbraith and Almaer

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 [...]