Upon further review... I finally got to the book and gave it a proper reading. (Although I still need to go back and do some of the excercises) I was inaccurate in my initial comments based on a superficial browsing of the book a couple months back. Mea culpa.
The first half is a lot of review, but there are definitely some nuggets and neat tricks in there, many he points out and others jump out at you. He does a good job of illustrating test-first scripting for example, he shows Ruby short-cuts and nuances that are cool but not necessarily obvious, etc. The middle chapters on project organization, packaging, building etc. are very valuable and definitely helped me see how I could reorganize some of the projects I've done to make them easier to mangage, enhance, and share with others. I look forward to using his project template utilities and seeing what they do. The last few chapters are really pretty cool -- I'm looking forward to reading them again and working on the exercises to catch everything but he hits on some slick stuff. And although it didn't meet my initial expectations, which as I've now learned were off-base from the book's intentions, I found it to be a very good resource on the craft of scripting and that it gives you a lot of tools and concepts to apply to your test scripting projects. I would recommend it to both newbies and experienced ruby programmers, as Chris McMahon pointed out "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." (and even then I bet :-) And lastly, the book has some good philosophy on scripting and testing in general. He provides a lot of insight from an experienced point of view that I found helpful and enlightening. _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
