Another disappointing software book. The concept of Test Driven Development is solid: use unit tests to drive the development of your code. Like in Extreme Programming, Kent Beck's writing style is facile, to the point of almost complete superficiality. The first half of the book describes — in overwraught detail — the development of a trivial example of code, one that any half-decent programmer could design and code in an hour. It appeared that the second major section would describe how to use xUnit (specifically PyUnit) to build test suites for code, but instead it is a pedantic exercise in building a superficial version of PyUnit, written with lousy Python programming style.

Reading this book was not, however, a complete waste of time. By spending time thinking about using tests to drive development, I've arrived at my own conclusions about what techniques to try. I can't, however, recommend this book to anyone else.