Mon, 18 Sep 2006
Perl Testing Developers Notebook - Short Review
The Perl
Testing Developers Notebook (PTDN) is the first of the O'Reilly
Developers Notebook series I've read. The format's good, a mix of the
cookbook and hacks series, but does the substance match the style?
At nine short chapters this book packs a fair amount in. It starts with how to write, run and read tests in chapters 1 and 2. Moving on to using Devel::Cover (a chunk of chapter 3) and, in chapter 4, introducing Test modules that'll help you cover your bases before releasing a module (or depending on your perspective make you jump through cargo coding hoops.) These early chapters provide a well written, nicely paced, introduction to Perl testing. If this is your first exposure to the Test:: Modules then this section will make your day, otherwise you'll probably skim read it and won't come back to this section, and chapter 4 in particular, after your first time through. The points it makes are sound but it lacks re-read value.
Chapters 5 and 6 cover replacing built-ins, mocking functions and objects and testing databases, both your interactions and the datasets. This is one of the best written examples of mocking using Perl that I've seen (although there isn't exactly a surplus of decent perl mocking documentation, there is a lot of documentation mocking perl but that's slightly different :)) and was the highlight of the book for me.
The book closes with chapters on testing websites (which gives some nice pointers to modules) and Apache modules, using Test::Class and using perl to wrap and test 'other things'. I didn't get a huge amount out of this section, beyond some pointers to modules I wasn't aware of, and it felt like the coverage was quite shallow; it shows you what you can do but seems to stop too early.
In general, the books short size and lots of concise labs fit the "this module does this testing task" format nicely, it's got quite a wide coverage for its page count and gives a number of pointers to modules that can make your testing life a lot easier.
Score: 7/10 if you're just starting out in perl testing. 5/10 if you're not (and most of that is for the mocking chapters).
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Posted: 2006/09/18 20:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Del.icio.us Stalking
A couple of months ago a friend of mine changed jobs and went to work with
some mutual techie acquaintances. What made this job interesting to me was
the confidential nature of the project and how little he was allowed to
say about it. In one of my flippant comments I mentioned that if I REALLY
wanted to know I could find out what he was working on. And the bet was
made.
I had a little bit of an advantage, I knew him, I knew a couple of his co-workers (all close-lipped buggers when it came to their projects) and I knew their email addresses and del.icio.us handles - and from this I went on a little trip. Watching what they posted to del.icio.us during the day (people feel a little less guilty about tagging stuff for work during work hours), looking at where their email addresses appeared (I got lucky and found a logwatch filter one of them had wrote for an application server - which was a nice pointer) and, by complete fluke, spotting two of them in a conference photo a mate forwarded to me. I had a number of areas they all seemed to be interested in.
After applying a little bit of filtering, anything hitting the front page of del.icio.us was was ignored, dropping anything relating to their CPAN modules, freshmeat projects and, in one case, published articles, I was left with what looked like an application stack. And some pointers to the vertical industry they were working in.
So where am I heading with this? Well first of all, curry bought by someone else always tastes nicer than curry you've had to pay for! Secondly, I was surprised by how little effort it took to see what they were interested in with regards to both work and personal projects - even without them writing blogs.
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Posted: 2006/09/18 19:36 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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