Book review: "Agile Java: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development"

I would like to write about the book I recently found on the university library shelves.

The book "Agile Java: Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development" is written by a developer and for developers targeting Object-Oriented programming languages. Although most of the presented examples are written in Java, they are applicable to any OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) language, such as C, C++, C#, Javascript, Python, Kotlin, etc. The code snippets demonstrate real-world problems and ways to solve them. Jeff Langr also recommends the readers to practice the principles of OOP themselves, solving the multiple assignments.

The author focuses on the approach called "Test-driven development", which suggests to revert the common flow of development - first writing code and then testing - to writing tests before code. The benefits of such an approach are 

● to cover more sophisticated scenarios 

● to take into account corner cases 

● to structure the code according to its usage and not the implementation. 

According to the author, following this methodology would serve for improved maintenance and smoother switching between developers, as the test base can serve as self-explanatory documentation. It is important to mention that the book was published in 2005, when the Agile methodology and TDD (Test-Driven Development) were just emerging, whereas nowadays they are among the world-wide acknowledged best practices. 

In this more than thousand pages long programming guide Jeff Langr covers various topics: from such basics as class definition to advanced discussions about multithreading. This makes "Agile Java" relevant to OOP developers of any level: both newcomers and senior programmers will spot something new on its pages.