Good information, but a bit superficial

Overall, I found the book's advice to be generally correct and useful, albeit lacking in proper detail. The main strength is common-sense testing advice and attempting to answer the "what to test" question, which has been ignored in other books on the topic. It would have been better for the book to cover technique thoroughly.

I would recommend this book for beginners. After that, I would recommend that they read Feathers for a description of how to refactor code to make it testable, and Osherove for a discussion on proper programming in unit tests. If you have a strong stomach, Beck's "TDD by Example" has useful information, but the "witty" section titles make it difficult to locate what you need.

This book outlines what to test, but doesn't cover it thoroughly. I'm not aware of any book that does, unfortunately. Most developers I've worked with test only the happy path, and spend their 20% coverage allowance on exception handlers and properties. I test exception handlers and shoot for 100% coverage, but I don't think anyone really tests boundary conditions or values that don't trigger conditional statements until he/she gets a bug report. (I was kind of hoping the "Right BICEP" and "CORRECT boundary conditions" chapters in the book under review would be dogmatic enough to bring me back to honesty.) Expanding those topics in a 3rd edition would give the author an opening in the market.

Other Reviews

• A concise introduction to .NET unit testing
• Good information, but a bit superficial
• Get better your code!!!
• Good, but missing critical elements
• Over-extended and over-rated.