A Friendly Introduction to Software Testing

I took Professor Laboon's Software Testing course at the University of Pittsburgh and loved it. So I was excited to pick up his full book on the topic.Who I think this book is for: If you're new to professional software development - maybe a CS or dev bootcamp graduate in your first full-time job - this book is a great resource. "A Friendly Introduction" surveys everything you need to know to be conversant in testing. The concepts the book covers - acceptance testing, load testing, black box vs. white box, penetration testing, TDD, chaos monkeys, and so much more - get tossed around dev shops with the assumption that everyone knows what they mean. Without a survey like this, getting up to speed on testing concepts is a months-long process of piecing together concepts from blog posts every time a more senior colleague drops some jargon you're unfamiliar with.Who this book is not for: If you're looking for a deep dive into any particular testing methodology or tool, look elsewhere. While the book is sprinkled liberally with Java code snippets, the survey format means that pausing to dwell on, say, the many different flavors of JUnit assertions would be untenable. If you are looking for a tutorial-style approach, consider supplementing this book with something like Sandi Metz's Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby or Kent Beck's TDD by Example.Full disclosure: I helped make a few grammar edits to an early draft of the book.

The content of this book is excellent and I have learned a lot! Five stars for the content. However, the Kindle formatting leaves something to be desired, so I am only giving the product 4 stars on the whole. The code samples have no indentation and the text also has weird formatting in places. Sometimes the text has page numbers or section headings interspersed with the text, as if someone just copy-pasted the content from a fully formatted Word doc into a Kindle document.In the attached screenshot, you will see the lack of indentation in the code sample, and also the random "14.6. TESTING SYSTEM OUTPUT 117" section heading/page number interspersed with the code.Bottom line: buy this book for the excellent content, but be aware the Kindle version has formatting issues.

I haven't finished it yet. But from the first several chapters I read, this is not a hard to read book for the topic. Testing methodology books, if badly written, can make readers want to tear the pages. This one does not - whenever an abstract concept is given, author appends an vivid example to illustrate. Also makes jokes when you are about to feel tired. Comparing to the software testing courses on the Udacity, this book is a faster source of knowledge to kit start software testing, and a huge savor of your will power - if you find the 'testing methodology' topic a boring one as I do.Would recommend.

This review applies specifically to the Kindle edition.There are many formatting errors such randomly misplaced/misformatted text for a subsequent section title/subtitle that just appear in the middle of a sentence which make this version very inconvenient to use. The examples are also very poorly formatted to the point of being difficult to parse/read

As a software engineer who is interested in understanding testing to a greater degree, this book provided a number of "aha" moments for me. I'm closing the book now feeling that I have a good lay of the land -- a mental framework for thinking about testing -- and can dive into a given subject with a good starting context. I highly, highly recommend this book. It will stay on my shelf for reference for years to come.Additionally, the material was a pleasure to read. I enjoyed the humor and examples. Thank you Bill Laboon.

Great introduction to software testing. Written very clearly and in a way that's easy to read. He adds humor and good examples to keep you reading. I highly recommend this book!

This book is great.Its strait to the point and gives you all the info you need. Also, the author has a fun writing style. I wish all guides were written this well.

The content is suitable for understanding the basics of testing and has really good points, sometimes is too much narrative to get to the chase

Very good and nice book!