21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clear and concise, June 27, 2005
The message of this book is: responsible developers unit test, and it's easy to do, so do it! If you're tired of reading 800 page books that should've been 200 pages, then you will find this book a refreshing change. It gets straight to the point, explaining in an easy-to-read style how to unit test .NET applications, including how to install & use the popular NUnit & NMock tools. It also explains how to design effective unit tests, and what to do in common problem situations (such as incomplete requirements). It is a great first book on unit testing for .NET, but since it is a pragmatic guide it does not cover the more esoteric, quirky issues you may run into. It also does not discuss or promote test-driven development techniques and theories. It is strictly a nuts & bolts discussion of .NET unit testing with NUnit & NMock, but if you need to be unit testing today (not next month), then this is the book to get.
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39 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Over-extended and over-rated., March 23, 2008
This review is from: Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Edition (Paperback)
I have to respectfully disagree with all the fawning reviews. It's a chatty, drawn out, tedious read, something of an accomplishment given the fact that it's only ~200 pages long. Frankly, anything more then something like the O'Reilly Pocket Reference is overkill on this subject. NUnit is a snap to use and the freely available documentation and tutorials are more than adequate and not nearly so time-consuming to digest.
The first passage that discusses actual test coding (~20 pages or so into the book) presents a simple case where a method should accept an integer array as a parameter and return the largest element. The book then explains how this function, if it behaves properly, should perform. A series of simple test cases are discussed before we get to the real toughie for all you computer scientists out there - a data set consisting of negative integers. A test vector consisting of the array [-9,-8,-7] is passed to the method and -7 is returned. The book explains 'It might look odd, but indeed -7 is larger than -9. We're glad we straightened that out now, rather than in the debugger or in production code where it might not be so obvious.'
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? Just what audience was this thing written for? One would have thought that that little gem wouldn't have been necessary... but in fact that is the tone of the entire book. Expect to have your hand held in this manner throughout. If that's the sort of thing that appeals to you, you'll love this one. If, on the other hand, you're trying to learn to incorporate NUnit testing into C# development in an efficient, professional manner, save your money and time and read the NUnit docs.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but missing critical elements, June 27, 2008
This review is from: Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Edition (Paperback)
This is a decent getting started book, but it doesn't give good coverage of things such as NUnit projects or using app.config files with NUnit.
Unfortunately, this book isn't good as a stand-alone. I'll admit that it did help me get started, but it lacks so much that I can't give it more stars. A second volume that covers more advanced topics is suggested, or the next edition can add the missing parts.
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