Minitest Cookbook

Book Notes

Okay, so, for the record with this review, The Minitest Cookbook was not the book I needed, nor expected. Take the rest of this review with a grain of salt as a result of that disclaimer.

I've been writing code that is tested with minitest tests for nearly a year now. I find that my understanding of when to use mocks versus stubs versus expects versus pick something else, to be somewhat lacking. Sure, I can cut and paste another test and modify as I need to modify it to fit my particular test case, but I don't want to copy and modify a test. I want to understand the reasoning behind what I'm doing and create a test, to understand "this is what I'm testing and this is how I go about it." Being able to do that quickly requires that I understand the system that I'm working on as a whole perhaps better than I do, but being able to do it without a full understanding is needed at this point.

So, I picked up this book as the recommended minitest book. Lots of favorable reviews, this is the book you want if you're learning minitest.

Except, it isn't.

It's too complicated for beginners (are n00b or newbies still derogatory terms, or have they been embraced by beginners - I guess if beginners are okay with being called dummies, they're okay with being n00bs), and not well organized for an intermediate user. I'd consider myself halfway between those two designations, so figured I'd get it, but, eh, didn't really work out that way.

Seems disingenuous to call this a cookbook. I understand Chris' reasoning and desire for a cookbook, but this isn't really a recipe book I can grab from and immediately have a tasty dish / running tests. 60% of the book was (and this is VERY specific to me) worthless for me as we don't use the Spec part of the minitest suite, and I'm not likely to write a minitest plugin any time soon.

Yeah, so, I'm not the target audience for this book, I didn't find it helpful (FOR ME, I feel I need to qualify that) for anything other than an overview of intermediate minitest thoughts from an advanced minitest developer thinking he's writing for the junior devs, though he's not; and pointers to other thoughts (which I found useful). I'd likely say skip it to my coworkers, along with, "Read http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html twice, then come talk to me and we'll walk through it."

Comments

Thank you!

Thanks for the review ;).

Add new comment