On a recent trip, I read Lasse Koskela’s Test-Driven, one of Manning’s latest releases. I opened it with the preconceived notion that there was nothing left for me to learn about Test-Driven Development, but Lasse presents the topic with a fresh perspective that I admire. Introductory text books tend to go stale, even after only a few years, and while Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development: By Example remains a classic, Test-Driven provides a much-needed update to the literature. Koskela goes beyond the basics to give the reader a valuable overview of today’s TDD landscape, including an extensive section on TDD at the story level, current information on tools and more recent examples of test-driving Enterprise Java components and applications.

Test-Driven‘s overview is quite extensive; any reader is sure to be satisfied by its reach. It was an ambitious project, not one I think I would have undertaken, but Lasse has come through it gracefully. The result is a solid addition to the literature that TDD practitioners can heartily recommend to their novice colleagues. While I don’t agree with some of Lasse’s test design style, he has plenty of great things to say about TDD and designing Java code, and readers will benefit from his experience.

Lasse’s writing is engaging, his examples illustrate his points well and he doesn’t beat around the bush. If you like directness of approach and of exposition, then Test-Driven is for you. I give it 4/5 on the amazon.com scale and plan to add it to the bibliographies of my TDD-related seminars and courses.