This book begins with very interesting ideas about software testing and for more info there exist an additional website http://xunitpatterns.com
This book contains actual unit test code examples which is good it let you to see really good examples for writing the tests.
Then author express opinion about how to convince other to use the methodology of the test driven development, which is really good explained in this book.
Next topics all about coupling and making sure that testsuite does not contain so called “heavy duty objects”, for me it make all sense, all tests should contain easy to set up fixtures, if test include hard to setup objects , well its clearly a bad code and should be refactor first before even including into test.
This book includes good examples and explanations of the mindset for the structuring the asserts statements in the code and how to make them transparent and clearly to understand.
Well-designed software takes a lot of time and consideration, this book describes why software tests are helpful and what kind of value they deliver.
Gerard Meszaros in his wisdom speaks about quality of software tests, which should be maintained and kept as the same quality as code and I totally agree with such statement.
The chapter about mocking a persistence layer make sense, but in my opinion testing always changing database can be a waste of time.
I found interesting the story about internals of Junit and that it somehow limited by the software design.
Certainly,Gerard Meszaros shows interesting recipes about how to create and use highly flexible fixture.
The book is really good mix of theory and practice advises, the main theme, get verifiable results, which not always easy , but possible and you should do it early before the whole project finalized.
Then there is topic about custom assertions and creating them, here is actually I strongly disagree with Gerard Meszaros, because creating custom assertions creates additional maintenance work, because not only those tests should be clean , but they should be consistent with testing framework itself and of course as soon as the testing framework is updated there is no guarantee that all those custom assertions will work.
Wow book even mentioning test spies, which to can be difficult to maintain and for me having tests without “spies” speed up development.
Once again testing directly database’s is a little bit tricky and not my favorite topic and i still dont get it , when it make sense do test databases.
Ah good you can find in this book a recipe for humble object pattern.
Oh wow the book author mentions all know testing frameworks even for VB programming language VB Lite Unit.
Summary: This is a must to read book for all Developers , testers.
For managers there is less value, except the cases where you really need to understand the software quality process.
Can i recommend this book ? Yes definitely , its good mix of theory and practice as usual Gerard Meszaros book is really good.