vi-nguyen

This is a really good 300 page book in 800+ pages. Trying to teach myself unit testing, without a more experienced mentor helping me, I ran into a lot of cases where the suggestions in normal unit testing books and guides didn't seem to work. This book had good solutions for many of those problems. Unfortunately, this book is incredibly repetitive with an unbelievable amount of duplicated content. It was to the point where I could read a new chapter, and for several pages I would swear that I must have already read it because it was so familiar. And when I wanted to look up something I remembered from the book, it was so hard to find it because the same topic is covered in so many places. It's not just that a topic is mentioned in several places and then really discussed in one place. I think Meszaros wanted the first part of the book to be a quick intro, and then the back of the book to be the encyclopedia reference with the full information. But the intros include 80% of the content in the reference section. And just as bad, I think Meszaros broke out the patterns too finely because many of them spend several paragraphs talking about other related patterns. Imagine if the GoF had made the Model, the View, and the Controller three separate patterns, but in each of the three patterns talked about how they fit together, and you'll get an idea. This book has some great content in a packaging that made me almost give up on it so many times. So it's not junk, but I would consider it a book of last resorts. If you have a unit testing question and can't find the answer anywhere else, try looking in this book.

2020-08-23 15:02