The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with Rspec, Cucumber, and Friends (The Facets of Ruby Series) [Paperback]

David Chelimsky (Author), Dave Astels (Author), Bryan Helmkamp (Author), Dan North (Author), Zach Dennis (Author), Aslak Hellesoy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1934356379 | ISBN-13: 978-1934356371 | Publication Date: December 22, 2010 | Edition: 1

You'll get started right away with RSpec 2 and Cucumber by developing a simple game, using Cucumber to express high-level requirements in language your customer understands, and RSpec to express more granular requirements that focus on the behavior of individual objects in the system. You'll learn how to use test doubles (mocks and stubs) to control the environment and focus the RSpec examples on one object at a time, and how to customize RSpec to "speak" in the language of your domain.

You'll develop Rails 3 applications and use companion tools such as Webrat and Selenium to express requirements for web applications both in memory and in the browser. And you'll learn to specify Rails views, controllers, and models, each in complete isolation from the other.

Whether you're developing applications, frameworks, or the libraries that power them, The RSpec Book will help you write better code, better tests, and deliver better software to happier users.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Chelimsky is the lead developer/maintainer of RSpec, and has contributed to several other open source projects including Cucumber, Aruba, and Rails. He has been developing software for over a decade, including three years training and mentoring agile teams at Object Mentor. He is currently a Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading Group in Chicago, IL. In his spare time, David likes to play guitar, travel, and speak something resembling Portuguese.

Dave Astels is the Director of Technology at ChannelFireball.com and has been involved with software and computing for over 25 years, recently having spent several years working exclusively with Ruby and Rails. Dave wrote the article that prompted Steven Baker to start the RSpec project.

Bryan Helmkamp maintains Webrat, a Ruby library to implement acceptance tests for web applications in an expressive and maintainable way, and is an active participant in the New York City Ruby community. Bryan is the CTO of Efficiency 2.0, a startup that helps people understand and reduce their energy use.

Dan North writes software and coaches teams and organizations in agile and lean methods. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication and understanding, which is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right." In 2003-4 this led him to develop the ideas that would become Behaviour-Driven Development. He is delighted by the community that has grown up around RSpec and Cucumber, and especially the enthusiasm and dedication of their core contributors. Dan is currently a Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading Group in London, where he gets to actually code again!

Zach Dennis is a co-founder and fellow human at Mutually Human Software, an expert custom software strategy and design consultancy in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has been enjoying Ruby for nearly eight years and has contributed to several projects such as Ruby's standard library documentation, Ruby on Rails, and RSpec. In his spare time, Zach loves spending time with his family, continuously learning, playing music, and running continuousthinking.com.

Aslak Hellesoy is a Senior Software Engineer at DRW Trading Group in London. While contributing to this book he was the Chief Scientist of BEKK Consulting in Oslo. In 2003, after seven years of professional Java programming, he fell in love with Ruby. He has contributed to dozens of open source projects and is the founder of the Cucumber project. Aslak likes to cook, ski, and travel.

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1 edition (December 22, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934356379
• ISBN-13: 978-1934356371
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,128 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Testing
  • #43 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Quality Control

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Room for Improvement, February 2, 2011

By 

R. Sandridge - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with Rspec, Cucumber, and Friends (The Facets of Ruby Series) (Paperback)

I hate to be the first one to give a less than great review of this book, especially since several of the authors are chiefly responsible for these great testing tools to be in existence. But I'd probably be even harder on the book than I am if I knew of a good alternative, which I don't. So best I can tell, this is still the best book to learn BDD using RSpec and Cucumber.

There seems to be a fair amount of errata that didn't get fixed prior to going to print. In fact, the book on whole seems like it could have used more in the editing process. I question the organization of the book; however I do get a sense of what the authors were trying to accomplish.

I am sympathetic to the challenges of writing a book for technologies that are very rapidly changing; that said, at a conference in June 2010, the author had already switched to using Capybara instead of Webrat, so I was shocked that the book went to print in December 2010 without mention of Capybara, which from what I can tell, seems to be the new de facto standard for browser simulation.

No doubt BDD while easy to understand at an abstract level, seems to be an art hard to explain concretely. Surely examples are the best way to learn, and fortunately this book does use plenty of examples. I love that they devote 100 pages specifically to BDD in Rails (although I'm sure developers using other languages and frameworks don't). I'd say this edition of the book is a good 0.8 release, and I look to the inevitable 1.0 (aka 2nd Edition).

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great intro to an important methodology, but lacks depth, February 19, 2011

By 

Mani Tadayon (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with Rspec, Cucumber, and Friends (The Facets of Ruby Series) (Paperback)

Behavior Driven Development is an important new methodology, and the authors of The RSpec Book provide a solid introduction to the theory and practice of BDD. However, I feel this book would have been just as good as a series of blog posts. This is not meant to denigrate the book, into which I know much effort was invested. However, the examples in the book fail to tackle the real-world challenges that you will face when implementing BDD.

Einstein said "Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but not simpler." A common fault of software courses and books is an avoidance of real-world complexity. For example. in The RSpec Book, the last 3 or 4 chapters are on BDD with Ruby on Rails. The sample application that is developed is ridiculously simple. Also, no cucumber specs are developed for it, so we are basically writing code for its own sake, rather than executing on the BDD mantra of "writing software that matters."

Both BDD and Ruby on Rails are meant to offer solutions for large, complex software projects and the ins and outs of their proper usage can only be learned by application to software that goes well beyond toy functionality. In a large Rails projects, with dozens of models with complex associations interacting with multiple gems, managing RSpec examples and Cucumber scenarios is a project in and of itself. The introductory example application "CodeBreaker" is better because it shows the full BDD development cycle with both cucumber and RSPec. Perhaps the authors should have built on that same example in the Ruby on Rails chapters.

In the end, if you want to learn BDD, you definitely should buy this book. The authors would do well, however, to bring in more of their real world experience in future editions.

One final note for those interested in advice on real-word BDD best practices, search Google for the following blog posts:
"You're cuking it wrong" by Jonas Nicklas
"You're cuking it right" by Mislav Marohnic

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you are a hard core developer, April 28, 2011

By 

David A. Taylor "Dave Taylor" (Philadelphia, PA, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with Rspec, Cucumber, and Friends (The Facets of Ruby Series) (Paperback)

I am a long time Web Developer, ramping back up on RoR. I was looking for a book that would help me develop a good solid testing environment on this new Rails 3 project that I am creating.

As I read and tried many of the little tiny examples in the book, and eventually decided that I do not want to do Cucumber (I do not need to spend the extra time to generate code to translate requirements from English, RSpec is clear enough for me). Unfortunately (from my perspective), much of the book rambles on about Cucumber and integrating it with RSpec.

As I went through the book and I found a section of code that interested me, it too frequently told me that I would hear more details later on, which I found quite frustrating. I was ready for the down-low, and never seemed to find it, until I eventually jumped to Chapters 23, 24 and 25. Chapters 23, 24 and 25 are the chapters that walk you through the process of developing Test/Behavior driven View, Controllers and Models. This is what I needed to get my project going.

This book is worth it, even if you only look at the RSpec chapters.

Oh, by the way, when you are looking into the tools you want to use for integration testing, I recommend looking into Capybara, which is not talked about in the book.

I hope this helps.
Dave Taylor (tayloredwebsites.com)