The test and watir coverage seemed > pretty light overall, mostly covered basic Ruby stuff like working with > Strings, Arrays, RegExp etc. and programming 101 - decision structures, > variables etc. Maybe good for a beginner, but didn't turn out to be > what I expected. No slight to Brian with whom some of you are probably > well acquainted, just didn't seem to meet my needs/expectations.
I just got my copy, and I've been surfing the first 50 pages or so. For one thing, there are subtle programming hints, even in the most mundane exercises, that are very nice bits of design to learn. As an example, for one part of the very first exercise we want to ignore certain filenames in the script. Rather than a conditional statement, Brian has the scripter construct a method "boring?" that checks for boring strings. Blocks are also introduced before conditionals. Very slick. Even if you know this stuff, there are surprising little bits that will still probably take you by surprise, unless you are very, very good at Ruby. The book's philosophy re: testing per se is on page 4: "Automating test execution is not the most efficient way to learn" and "Automating test execution may not be the most effective thing for you to do". But the 'test/unit' library is introduced in the second part, so testing is definitely a big part of the book. -Chris _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
