Finished test-driven development: A Practical Guide by David Astels. The book contains three parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to test-driven development. Part 2 discusses various tools and techniques for doing TDD. Part 3 presents an extended example by going through the test-driven development of a movie rating application.

Test-driven development builds on the principle that developers should write tests before they write code. The tests determine the code that needs to be written. As a side effect, this results in a suite of programmer tests. However, the book stresses that TDD primarily exists as a development methodology, not a testing methodology. The test suite produced by this methodology should not be considered a replacement for through testing by those who have testing as their primary goal.

My detailed impressions of the book and test-driven development.

test-driven development: A Practical Guide provides a good introduction to test-driven development. It contains many useful insights and practical tips. However, I suspect that you can find more focused, up-to-date introductions to the topic than the one found in this book. ( )

Pretty good content, although it gets boring near the end (perhaps because I don't do GUI apps). I would have appreciated some examples of testing HTTP interactions, but still liked the book overall. A nice pairing with [book: Test Driven Development: By Example]. ( )

Astels provides a good guide to test-driven development (TDD). The bulk of the book works through an example of developing a Swing-based GUI application using TDD. The book is quite Java-centric, but there's several sections at the end on unit testing tools for non-Java languages, and the general concepts should apply to any language. It was also nice to see how to apply TDD to a GUI, which is something I didn't understand before reading the book. If you're interested in trying out TDD, but you don't really know how to proceed, this is a good place to start.