I recently finished reading Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit. It’s a good overview of unit testing and I picked up a few things from it. I’ve previously read several of the books referenced in this one, including Kent Beck’s XP book (Extreme Programming Explained). I also have Pragmatic Version Control, which I haven’t had a chance to look at yet.

I learned a few new acronyms from this book – the authors seemed to like using them as memory aids. A good design principal, Don’t Repeat Yourself, or DRY, was my favorite. Others included Right BICEP, A-TRIP, and CORRECT for What To Test, What makes a Good Test, and what to look for in Boundary Conditions, respectively. The book includes a summary page that is sort of a Cliff’s Notes version of the book, which is actually pretty handy (especially if you’re reviewing the book).

One of my primary reasons for checking out this book was to learn more about mock objects, since I’ve never gotten into using them. There is a good chapter on them, I thought (coming from zero real experience), which includes some coverage of a few open source tools like NMockand DotNetMock. It at least succeeded in making me want to check out mock objects some time.

Overall the book was a fairly quick read, the authors’ tone was comfortable and in good English. I didn’t find any errors in the code listings. So, as an intro to unit testing, I think this book does a good job. It’s only 150 pages long, so it’s not a huge tome. It’s something you can throw in your bag and read on an airplane, and perhaps finish depending on how far you’re going and how fast you read…