Test-Driven Development with Python, 2nd Edition

By taking you through the development of a real web application from beginning to end, the updated second edition of this hands-on guide demonstrates the practical advantages of test-driven development (TDD) with Python. You’ll learn how to write and run tests before building each part of your app, and then develop the minimum amount of code required to pass those tests. The result? Clean code that works.

Author Harry J.W. Percival uses a concrete example—the development of a web site, from scratch—to teach TDD methodology and how it applies to web programming, from the basics of database integration and Javascript to more advanced topics such as mocking, Ajax, and REST APIs. It’s ideal for relative newcomers and self-taught web developers looking to take their skills to the next level with a more structured approach.

Table of Contents

Part I. The Basics of TDD and Django
Chapter 1. Getting Django Set Up Using a Functional Test
Chapter 2. Extending Our Functional Test Using the unittest Module
Chapter 3. Testing a Simple Home Page with Unit Tests
Chapter 4. What Are We Doing with All These Tests? (And, Refactoring)
Chapter 5. Saving User Input: Testing the Database
Chapter 6. Improving Functional Tests: Ensuring Isolation and Removing Voodoo Sleeps
Chapter 7. Working Incrementally

Part II. Web Development Sine Qua Nons
Chapter 8. Prettification: Layout and Styling, and What to Test About It
Chapter 9. Testing Deployment Using a Staging Site
Chapter 10. Getting to a Production-Ready Deployment
Chapter 11. Automating Deployment with Fabric
Chapter 12. Splitting our tests into multiple files, and a generic wait helper
Chapter 13. Validation at the Database Layer
Chapter 14. A Simple Form
Chapter 15. More Advanced Forms
Chapter 16. Dipping Our Toes, Very Tentatively, into JavaScript
Chapter 17. Deploying Our New Code

Part III. More Advanced Topics in Testing
Chapter 18. User Authentication, Spiking and De-Spiking
Chapter 19. Using Mocks to Test External Dependencies or Reduce Duplication
Chapter 20. Test Fixtures and a Decorator for Explicit Waits
Chapter 21. Server-Side Debugging
Chapter 22. Finishing “My Lists”: Outside-In TDD
Chapter 23. Test Isolation, and “Listening to Your Tests”
Chapter 24. Continuous Integration (CI)
Chapter 25. The Token Social Bit, the Page Pattern, and an Exercise for the Reader
Chapter 26. Fast Tests, Slow Tests, and Hot Lava