Testing, Design, and Cloud Computing

Uncover surprises, risks, and potentially serious bugs with exploratory testing. Rather than designing all tests in advance, explorers design and execute small, rapid experiments, using what they learned from the last little experiment to inform the next. Learn essential skills of a master explorer, including how to analyze software to discover key points of vulnerability, how to design experiments on the fly, how to hone your observation skills, and how to focus your efforts.

Modern web development takes more than just HTML and CSS with a little JavaScript mixed in. Clients want more responsive sites with faster interfaces that work on multiple devices, and you need the latest tools and techniques to make that happen. This book gives you more than 40 concise, tried-and-true solutions to today’s web development problems, and introduces new workflows that will expand your skillset.

CSS is fundamental to the web, but it’s a basic language and lacks many features. Sass is just like CSS, but with a whole lot of extra power so you can get more done, more quickly. Build better web pages today with Pragmatic Guide to Sass. These concise, easy-to-digest tips and techniques are the shortcuts experienced CSS developers need to start developing in Sass today.

Building high performance websites is hard—let’s go shopping! Better yet, let’s take the best ideas from the past 10 years on how to improve HTTP and wrap them up in a brand new protocol named SPDY. In The SPDY Book, you will learn all of the secrets behind this new protocol from Google. Compression, multiplexing, writing directly to the browser’s cache are not only possible with SPDY, but easy. Google is already using it in production on all of their sites to make their services even faster. Why shouldn’t your websites do the same?

This book, available in PDF, mobi, and ePub formats, was entirely written and produced by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.

Have you ever been angry at your computer or cell phone? This book is for designers, developers, and product managers who are charged with what sometimes seems like an impossible task: making sure products work the way your users expect them to. This book shows you how to design applications and websites that people will not only use, but will absolutely love.

Still chasing bugs and watching your code deteriorate? Think TDD is only for desktop or web apps? It’s not: TDD is for you, the embedded C programmer. TDD helps you prevent defects and build software with a long useful life. This is the first book to teach the hows and whys of TDD for C programmers.

Rails Test Prescriptions is a comprehensive guide to testing Rails applications, covering Test-Driven Development from both a theoretical perspective (why to test) and from a practical perspective (how to test effectively). It covers the core Rails testing tools and procedures for Rails 2 and Rails 3, and introduces popular add-ons, including RSpec, Shoulda, Cucumber, Factory Girl, and Rcov.

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) gives you the best of Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, and Acceptance Test Driven Planning techniques, so you can create better software with self-documenting, executable tests that bring users and developers together with a common language.

Get the most out of BDD in Ruby with The RSpec Book, written by the lead developer of RSpec, David Chelimsky.

Test-driven development (TDD) is a programming technique that reverses the usual sequence of coding and testing. By writing tests just in advance of the code needed to satisfy them, programmers:

• Work with confidence
• Work on a series of achievable steps instead of tackling a big problem all at once
• Ensure that software design meets the need of the actual code
• Leave behind a suite of tests to help preserve the integrity of the code

Note: Although the ideas aren’t language specific the author does use Java in the examples.

Bill Karwin has helped thousands of people write better SQL and build stronger relational databases. Now he’s sharing his collection of antipatterns—the most common errors he’s identified in those thousands of requests for help.

Most developers aren’t SQL experts, and most of the SQL that gets used is inefficient, hard to maintain, and sometimes just plain wrong. This book shows you all the common mistakes, and then leads you through the best fixes. What’s more, it shows you what’s behind these fixes, so you’ll learn a lot about relational databases along the way.

Learn to build configuration file readers, data readers, model-driven code generators, source-to-source translators, source analyzers, and interpreters. You don’t need a background in computer science—ANTLR creator Terence Parr demystifies language implementation by breaking it down into the most common design patterns. Pattern by pattern, you’ll learn the key skills you need to implement your own computer languages.

Professional programmers develop a knack of unerringly zeroing in on the root cause of a bug. They can do that because they’ve written a lot of buggy code and then gained experience fixing it. This book captures all this experience—use it, and you’ll find you write fewer bugs, and the ones you do write will become easier to hunt down.

If you need to automatically test a user interface, this book is for you. Whether it’s Windows, a Java platform (including Mac, Linux, and others) or a web app, you’ll see how to test it reliably and repeatably.

Many automated test frameworks promise the world and deliver nothing but headaches. Fortunately, you’ve got a secret weapon: Ruby. Ruby lets you build up a solution to fit your problem, rather than forcing your problem to fit into someone else’s idea of testing.

This book is for people who want to get their hands dirty on examples from the real world—and who know that testing can be a joy when the tools don’t get in the way. It starts with the mechanics of simulating button pushes and keystrokes, and builds up to writing clear code, organizing tests, and beyond.

eBook

This version, last updated Jan 2012, refreshes the RSpec examples for version 2.x. It also contains an updated section on narrative-style tests, based on Cucumber 1.x. Ian has tweaked code samples throughout the book for compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.9.2, or JRuby 1.6.5, based on what the underlying libraries support.

“Accessibility” has a reputation of being dull, dry, and unfriendly toward graphic design. But there is a better way: well-styled semantic markup that lets you provide the best possible results for all of your users. This book will help you provide images, video, Flash and PDF in an accessible way that looks great to your sighted users, but is still accessible to all users.

Pragmatic programmers use feedback to drive their development and personal processes. The most valuable feedback you can get while coding comes from unit testing. Now in it’s second edition, Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Ed. will show you how to do software unit testing, of course, but more importantly will show you what to test.

For various technical reasons, the eBook version is a PDF: epub and mobi versions of this title will NOT be available.

Learn by pragmatic example how to create effective designs composed of interfaces to objects, components and services.

You’ll learn what polymorphism and encapsulation really mean, and how to use these ideas more effectively. See how to create better interfaces using agile development techniques, and learn the subtle differences between implementing an interface and inheriting an implementation. Take a fresh, modern view of Design By Contract and class responsibilities. Understand the basis of a service-oriented architecture, including stateful versus stateless interfaces, procedural versus document models, and synchronous versus asynchronous invocations.

Pragmatic programmers use feedback to drive their development and personal processes. The most valuable feedback you can get while coding comes from unit testing.

Let your Java code tell you what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll learn how to test using JUnit, but more importantly, you’ll learn what to test.

For various technical reasons, the eBook version is a PDF: epub and mobi versions of this title will NOT be available.

Straight from the programming trenches, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master cuts through the increasing specialization and technicalities of modern software development to examine the core process—what do you do, as an individual and as a team, if you want to create software that’s easy to work with and good for your users.

This classic title is regularly featured on software development “Top Ten” lists, and is issued by many corporations to new hires.

We wrote this book before we created our publishing business, and we do not publish it. The Pragmatic Programmer is published by Addison Wesley, and may not contain the same ebook features or format the same as our Pragmatic Bookshelf books. Paperbacks are available wherever old-fashioned paperback books are sold, and the ebook is available here—all available ebook formats for one price, with no restrictive DRM.

For more on The Pragmatic Programmer have a look at the Pragmatic Programmer Resources page.