Over the last 4 weeks I’ve been taking the Coursera course Learning how to Learn on the recommendation of my friend Srini. The 2nd assignment in the course is to create a presentation or some form of media to present an understanding of the topics. An accompaniment to the course is the book, A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley (the primary course instructor), which is a short read but very insightful and full of references. I’m thoroughly enjoying the course and love the concept around the assignment. This blog is my way of trying to synthesize ideas that are flying around in my head, which is exactly the purpose of the assignment.

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Disclaimer - I personally know Manoj and have worked with him in the past. I was asked to review his book, Learning Continuous Integration with TeamCity, by Packt Publishing.

As someone who had spent many years consulting around the benefits of CI and implementing build and release strategies, I was interested in how the minutiae would be brought up in a book.

The book begins by going through the creation and configuration of a similar build process for 3 specific tech stacks: Java, .Net, and Ruby. At first it feels rather repetitive but the repetition actually helps reinforce the importance of consistency. With all tech stacks, the procedure is pretty much the same: Checkout, Build, Test, Package, Deploy, Run UI Tests. This pattern really stands out after going through chapters 4, 5 and 6 and builds up a foundation for the reader so that the rest of the material makes sense.

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In a recent splurge I purchased 4 books from Manning Press with one of them being The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove.

I would categorize myself as relatively new to unit testing. My first hands on testing was when I took the Nothing but .Net bootcamp with JP Boodhoo but he emphasized BDD style tests. I saw the benefit of BDD but didn’t feel I had the know how to implement them properly. About 3 months ago I started writing tests in a more unit test like fashion and things started clicking.

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