Books

The RSpec Book

Published by the legendary Pragmatic Press, the RSpec book is the first end-to-end treatment of BDD. Focusing on the technical aspects of BDD using Ruby, it introduces the reader to BDD tools RSpec and Cucumber, through a fully-worked example.

The RSpec Book cover

From the Pragmatic Press site:

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) gives you the best of Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, and Acceptance Test Driven Planning techniques, so you can create better software with self-documenting, executable tests that bring users and developers together with a common language.

You’ll get started right away with RSpec 2 and Cucumber by developing a simple game, using Cucumber to express high-level requirements in language your customer understands, and RSpec to express more granular requirements that focus on the behaviour of individual objects in the system. You’ll learn how to use test doubles (mocks and stubs) to control the environment and focus the RSpec examples on one object at a time, and how to customize RSpec to “speak” in the language of your domain.

Whether you’re developing applications, frameworks, or the libraries that power them, The RSpec Book will help you write better code, better tests, and deliver better software to happier users.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

97 Things… started as an idea for a wiki, grew into a repository and became a book published by O’Reilly. Kevlin Henney collects nuggets of wisdom from all sorts of contributors, mostly real but occasionally fictional, to produce a fantastic desktop reference or Christmas present for the geek in your life.

97 Things cover

From O’Reilly’s website:

Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every programmer should know, no matter what language you use. With the 97 short and extremely useful tips for programmers in this book, you’ll expand your skills by adopting new approaches to old problems, learning appropriate best practices, and honing your craft through sound advice.