In April, we officially released Rails Testing Handbook, a free ebook in which our engineers shared how to write tests and practice BDD to develop sustainable Rails applications. The handbook teaches you all you need to know about the BDD approach of analyzing, testing, coding, and designing a system in one short feedback loop. BDD helps us produce better software, while also avoiding mistakes and wasteful work.
You can now also download Rails Testing Handbook for Kindle.
Why we wrote the Rails Testing Handbook
Writing code driven by tests is pretty much how we built and grew Semaphore, our CI/CD product. All that time, we’ve been doing BDD, and it has helped us write robust, sustainable code at a steady pace. We’ve seen hands-on that, as the software development industry matures, doing BDD is becoming a standard mark of a software craftsman.
Our desire to share what we learned has lead us to write and publish many tutorials focused on Test-Driven and Behavior Driven Development for all major open source languages, including Ruby. As the next step, we’ve written a handbook encompassing everything a developer needs to build sustainable Rails applications.
What does the Rails Testing Handbook cover?
In Rails Testing Handbook, you’ll learn how to:
- Get in the BDD mindset and apply it in practice;
- Set up RSpec, Cucumber, database cleaner and other tools;
- Develop features from scratch in red – green – refactor cycles;
- Write integration tests as Cucumber scenarios;
- Write controller tests using RSpec with the mocking approach;
- Write model specs with RSpec;
- Collaborate via pull requests and continuous integration.
Can I get the book for free?
Amazon doesn’t allow us to publish the book for free, so you can download the Kindle version for $1.19. Since we didn’t write the book to earn money from it, we’ll donate all the profits from the book to the local Rails Girls organization that helps women and girls get started with building Rails applications.
You can still get the pdf book for free, go here to download it. When you sign up for the book, you’ll also get a bonus series of emails with our other Ruby-related posts to help you with improving your Rails skills.
We’d love to hear what you think about the book. Let us know how you like it and what else you’d like to learn about testing Rails applications in the comments below, or via email.
Happy building!