[caption id=“attachment_813” align=“alignleft” width=“243” caption=“Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide”][/caption]

It is very rare to find a book that covers testing in the software world. Testing is something that authors will briefly mention on programming books and if you’re lucky you may even find a couple of lines of code related to the subject. So it was with great excitement that I purchased  “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide"by Daniel Arbuckle!.

For the longest time I have wanted to start wrapping my code in testing functions so to improve the quality and reliability of what I write here at work. This book does a pretty decent job at introducing the reader to several of the major Python tools for test driven development such as doctests, unittest, nose, etc. Contrary to the recurring method of going through chapter upon chapter of introductory background information, the author (much to my delight) chose to hit the ground running and get right to the point. All chapters are filled to the brim with detailed examples and sample code to follow along, though some of the use cases felt a bit too specific to a given area and not something the broader audience can relate to.

For good or bad, this book expects that the reader is well versed in Python and the generic idea behind why test driven development is a good thing. So if you’re missing one of these “requirements”, you should probably pick up some additional material (check out “Expert Python Programming" by Tarek Ziadé).

Overall, I recommend this book for the Python coder out there who takes pride in their code and want to start delivering quality over quantity.