Customer Reviews

Foundations of Agile Python Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are looking to purchase this book, and you are in the year 2010 or beyond, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. Please continue reading my review below, however, to understand why.

This book is outdated because:

1. It has extremely detailed instructions for using eclipse (the IDE) with pydev, mylyn, and pydev-extensions. Eclipse has changed a LOT since this book was written, and the instructions are no longer accurate. The pydev-extensions plugin doesn't actually exist anymore, it was merged with pydev. This can be confusing for new users trying to get things running.

2. The instructions for getting buildbot running are no longer correct. Buildbot has changed a bit as well, and the details for installation is different than it used to be.

3. It spends a while talking about pMock, one of 2 python mock libraries, which hasn't been developed since 2004 and is considered obsolete.

4. It spends a while talking about pyfit, which hasn't been worked on since 2006 and is also not commonly used.

Now, for my thoughts about the book itself:

I decided to give this book a 5 star review because it is an excellent book:

- The author writes extremely well, and has a bit of humor throughout the book.
- The author covers extensions why TDD is good, how it helps, and how it should be used.
- The author describes the different types of testing, and provides clear, intuitive, and thoughtful examples that clearly demonstrate *how to* do the testing.
- The author covers extremely detailed setup / installation / configuration of the tools and development environments discussed.

The reason why I have to not recommend any readers purchase this book though, is that it is sorely in need of an update. I just finished reading this book (August, 2010), and it is very clear that it is outdated. This book would have been extremely useful two years ago, and maybe also the first quarter of 2009, but agile practices and tools have changed so much since then that this book really needs to be rewritten.

My advice to readers who are considering purchasing this book is to do so only if you are aware of what you will be getting, but would like to make use of the author's code examples, writing, and TDD explanations while disregarding the tools used.

I really did enjoy reading this book, however, and I really hope that Apress forces Jeff to release a new copy.

If you're like me, you started programming by writing code. You learned the syntax, looked up things as you went along, and eventually became a proficient programmer. In other words, you took the bottom-up approach.

Now you're hearing all the buzz-words: agile, revision control, test-driven development, unit testing, stubs, mock-ups, code coverage, and more. This stuff requires a top-down approach -- understanding it on a high level before being able to use it to its fullest. Sure, you probably use CVS or Subversion and test your code. But this book gives you the full picture, and ties everything together.

If this wasn't taught in school when you learned to code, or you earned your skills the hard way, and you love Python, then I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Check out the table of contents and see for yourself. I like the fact that it explains the high-level concepts clearly and with enough background that you feel like you "get it" before moving on to the examples.

I was not disappointed when I started reading this book.
The first chapter which covers the theory of "Agile Development", is just great.
Now, I am no agile programming expert. The only thing I currently do is write a lot unit tests. But I think I will take some advice for the future (like pair-p.) from this book.
The pace of the book is great (relief after the lutz books), and the authors personal experience in the field is both reassuring, encouraging and interesting.
Coming from a background of C#.NET I am glad that python is getting some help in IDE department and will certainly give some tools a try.
I love the book but YMMV.

Errata (apress does not provide one):
P.99: There is a mention of configure.py in the file list of svn with ? status. This file was never mentioned before.
Where did it come from and what does it represent???

p.109: " 'factory': f " should really be with "f1" at the bottom.

p.112: When issuing "create-slave" command the slave name used is "rsreader-linux"
whereas it was configured to be "slave-lnx01".