Keywords: End-to-end tests (“system level tests”), integration tests, unit tests.

If you struggle with test being too complicated or too brittle, or not being sure how to test something like a persistence layer, this book is for you.

Other books I recommend in this context: Clean Code, Test Driven Development. By Example, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, The Pragmatic Programmer, .. And, more in general, I guess most of those found here.

Included books:
* Clean Code by Uncle Bob
* The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
* Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt
* Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
* Software Conflict 2.0 and Software Creativity 2.0 by Robert L. Glass

I had the chance to apply some of the new (for me) ideas from the books on a few of my projects and I was stunned by the immediate improvement of my code.

At first I struggled a little bit with recommendations like using object variables instead of parameters for example. But after using this technique a few times the benefits became apparent to me in a very “personalized context”. I still tend to use method parameters to guide the use of methods. My idea was: A method returns a value that is required by another method. This way it is clear in what order to call the methods. But I understand that this is really not a good argument. Why in the first place should/would it be unclear in what order to use the methods? Exactly.. this is the real problem you should tackle. After that it doesn’t really matter anymore whether you use parameters or object variables/fields. And then in fact it is better to use fields because the reduce the noisiness of the code.

Anyway. This book has a lot of useful information and tips. If you consider yourself a genius programmer you probably don’t need this book. For everyone else there is probably some interesting stuff to be found.