Grumpy Programmer’s Testing Bundle: Review

After having gotten some constructive feedback regarding my testing practices on the basic TDD in your new PHP package tutorial, I decided to read Chris Hartjes “Grumpy Testing Bundle”, a set of two books consisting of The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications and The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook. It was my hope that those books will prevent me from using the shoddy practices I displayed in that original post and which originally prompted Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s critique. In this post, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned, and how much this helped me, if at all.

The Grumpy Programmer’s Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications

The first thing I noticed when opening the book was the low page count. For a hefty $20, one would expect more than 68 pages (including dedication, intro, ToC, etc). One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (or page count), though, so I dove in enthusiastically, disregarding this.

The book has a total of 15 chapters, and only really starts in chapter 7. If you just read Peter’s tutorial on code analysis tools and are familiar with environment isolation like Vagrant (e.g. our Homestead Improved box), you can skip right to it, as those are the only topics the author touches on in those first 22 pages. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there due to the severe outdatedness.

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by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint