Langworth Ian Chromatic - Perl Testing: A Developers Notebook

As youll see in the "" section, developers notebooks are built entirely around example code. Youll see code on nearly every page, and its code that does something not trivial Hello World! programs that arent worth more than the paper theyre printed on.

Ever read a book that seems to be aimed at pointy-haired bosses, filled with buzzwords, and feels more like a marketing manifesto than a programming text? We have tooand these books are the antithesis of that. In fact, a good notebook is incomprehensible to someone who cant program (dont say we didnt warn you!), and thats just the way its supposed to be. But for developers...its as good as it gets.

Do you really have time to sit around reading something that isnt any fun? If you do, then maybe youre into thousand-page language referencesbut if youre like the rest of us, notebooks are a much better fit. Practical code samples, terse dialogue centered around practical examples, and even some humor here and therethese are the ingredients of a good developers notebook.

If you want to read a book late at night without a computer nearby, these books might not be that useful. The intent is that youre coding as you go along, knee deep in bytecode. For that reason, notebooks talk code, code, code. Fire up your editor before digging in.

We dont let just anyone write a developers notebookyouve got to be a bona fide programmer, and preferably one who stays up a little too late coding. While full-time writers, academics, and theorists are great in some areas, these books are about programming in the trenches, and are filled with instruction, not lecture.

This isnt a nutshell (there, we said it). You wont find 100-page indices with every method listed, and you wont see full-page UML diagrams with methods, inheritance trees, and flow charts. What you will find is page after page of source code. Are you starting to sense a recurring theme?

It seems that many programming books these days have three, four, or more chapters before you even see any working code. Im not sure who has authors convinced that its good to keep a reader waiting this long, but its not anybody working on this series. We believe that if youre not coding within 10 pages, somethings wrong. These books are also chock-full of practical application, taking you from an example in a book to putting things to work on your job, as quickly as possible.

Developers Notebooks try to communicate different information than most books, and as a result, are organized differently. They do indeed have chapters, but thats about as far as the similarity between a notebook and a traditional programming book goes. First, youll find that all the headings in each chapter are organized around a specific task. Youll note that we said task , not concept . Thats one of the important things to get about these booksthey are first and foremost about doing something. Each of these headings represents a single lab. A lab is just what it sounds likesteps to accomplish a specific goal. In fact, thats the first heading youll see under each lab: How do I do that? This is the central question of each lab, and youll find lots of down-and-dirty code and detail in these sections.

Some labs have some things not to do (ever played around with potassium in high school