Python Testing: Beginner's Guide [Paperback]

Daniel Arbuckle (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1847198848 | ISBN-13: 978-1847198846 | Publication Date: February 19, 2010

The book begins with the very foundations of automated testing, and expands on them until the best-practice tools and techniques are fully covered. New concepts are illustrated with step-by-step hands-on exercises. Testing will be easier and more enjoyable with this beginner's guide. If you are a Python developer and want to write tests for your applications, this book will get you started and show you the easiest way to learn testing. You need to have sound Python programming knowledge to follow along. An awareness of software testing would be good, but no formal knowledge of testing is expected nor do you need to have any knowledge of the libraries discussed in the book.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Daniel Arbuckle

Daniel Arbuckle holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. While at USC, he performed original research in the Interaction Lab (part of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems) and the Laboratory for Molecular Robotics (now part of the Nanotechnology Research Laboratory). His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and in the proceedings of international conferences.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (February 19, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847198848
• ISBN-13: 978-1847198846
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #830,789 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good book, one of the few about the topic in Python, March 9, 2010

By 

Paulo Nuin Suano "nuin" (Kingston, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Python Testing: Beginner's Guide (Paperback)

I received this book for review from Packt Publishing due to the fact that I have a blog about Python and Bioinformatics. Test driven development preaches that most of the code (ideally all of it) should be wrapped in test functions that will show if your code is producing the right output or not. And this book gives a very nice introduction to the topic if you are using Python as your language of choice. PTBG is a very well written book, with detailed explanations of the major Python tools for test driven development: doctests, unittest, nose, among others.

The book gives short introduction about the topic, but jumps right into the action in the first chapters. One thing that I liked is that the book does not have a introduction to Python section, like many other books that are supposed to be about an specific topic, so you don't waste space and time. Also, PTBG is unique among Python-related books, as there are not many published options about this subject. Of course there's ample material online about test driven development, but if you need a good (introductory) reference book about it, this is the book to buy.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of ideas, could be more comprehensive, February 20, 2010

By 

Juho Vepsäläinen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Python Testing: Beginner's Guide (Paperback)

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher, Packt Publishing.

I have been actively using test-driven development methodology for a few years already so I am probably not exactly in the intended target market of the book. I still managed to pick a few valuable nuggets of information from it, though. As stated in the book description, it is essential that you have already basic knowledge of Python. It's definitely needed.

The book uses extremely practical approach in the expense of theory. It walks the reader through various coding tasks with clear prose. There were times when I felt that the examples were a little bit overwhelming. This should not be much of a problem as long as you are prepared to spend the time on them. In addition to the walkthroughs the book contains some reference information and useful quizzes that can be used to check your knowledge.

It would have been useful to have some background information on testing (ie. history, taxonomy of tools and approaches) as appendices. The book covers the basic testing methodology well but I would have appreciated at least some discussion on advanced approaches (ie. BDD, ATDD, refactoring, fuzz testing, etc.).

All things considered if you decide to pick up the book, it might be a good idea to look into additional material focusing on theory of testing, testing patterns and agile methodologies for enhanced understanding of the subject matter.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a great book for beginning testers, April 20, 2010

By 

Matthew Reid "http://themattreid.com" (The Internet) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Python Testing: Beginner's Guide (Paperback)

I've recently had the pleasure of reading "Python Testing: An easy and convenient approach to testing your python projects" from Packt Publishing. It's been a quick read but a solid set of instructions on the different methods for the subject.

The book starts out very quickly with details about the various methods that are available, the means of automation for testing, and of course the environment you'd want to be in for working on the subjects that the book covers. It then, in the second chapter, moves into the guts of testing by describing the basics of doctest via syntax and some simple examples, and then moves on to a real world example via the AVL tree. It's all very basic testing until chapter three where the author gets into unit testing, which is probably the most useful method in my opinion, and he goes to prove it's usefulness with examples of it's use in different parts and stages of the development process. Later in the book the python mocker is used to separate unit sections, and then the actual unittest framework is discussed with more examples and a enough details that if you don't understand it by then, you may never. By chapter six we are into the Nose app that drives the unittest, which is very useful of course.

The most useful part of the book comes toward the end where the author discusses and the walks through the method used to create a test-driven application and then even shows examples via the whole chapter dedicated towards making a testable web application frontend. Very impressive for such a quick read. Integration testing and System testing is also covered, thankfully. The final chapter covers some useful tools and techniques of which I particularly enjoyed the section on version control hooks. If you are not using version control in your development process you need to start now, as such the hooks for integration with the test framework are rather useful to know.

Overall this is a very nice book that discusses python application testing from the ground up. It's perfect for a beginner or an intermediate python programmer that has little to no experience in automated testing methods. More advanced programmers that have already used these methods will probably not find the book too useful except for the last chapter that covers extra tools and techniques that they might not have seen before. If I didn't have this book and needed to learn about python testing, it would be my first choice and my only recommendation so far. Well written and very useful.

If there is one thing I do not like about the book, it would be the reliance on the python CLI for running commands. I am a CLI kind of person and I keep lots of terminals open at the same time, so I prefer to write my code in an editor or IDE in one term tab, then switch to another and execute the script; I do not use the python command line to do much of anything. So following some of the steps in the book require that you follow the CLI method and that gets old for me. It's a personal preference but one worth noting as there is a lot of it in the book. That's the only thing I did not enjoy in a book that was otherwise basically perfect for the subject.