Stolen Art of Unit Testing

I just read a blog post by the author of the book The Art of Unit Testing. He said a PDF version of his book was being shared illegally. The guy even posted a link to one such illegal download. So I downloaded it. I read the first chapter. That's as far as I got. I won't be buying the book.

Even though I took a pass, there were some things to learn from Chapter 1. Your project may fail even if you have unit tests. If fact the unit tests can be a liability. It does not matter whether you employ Test Driven Development. You might still fail. I believe that.

The author does encourage you to use a unit test framework. The examples in his book use NUnit. He also states that unit tests should run quickly. They should be able to finish in a few minutes. He must be talking about some specific unit tests, not the tests for a big system. You should also set up you tests so they do not require manually configuration before running.

I will give the guy one thing. The PDF version of his book was pretty good for a PDF. Most PDFs I view are boring black and white things. He used color appropriately. Since he was getting ripped off by people passing around free copies of his book, I will give out a link to buy The Art of Unit Testing on Amazon. Good luck Roy.