Unit Testing: Perl & Ruby on Rails

samantha — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:02:00 -0500

Going back to my last post – I finally settled on using Test::Unit. I already had my code written, but my test code ended up being twice, yes, twice as long as my actual code.

I got a lot of help with logic from reading parts of Intermediate Perl. After looking back over the last few months of the journey that has been learning perl, I’ve realized that some ‘grokking’ really comes with experience and doing. After coding for a couple of months, I can happily say that the book makes a lot more sense to me now than it did back in September.

Switching Gears

Currently, I’m focusing on Ruby on Rails. With that endeavor, I’m also looking at the concepts that go along with writing test code before and during the coding process. Whether it’s TDD (Test Driven Development) or not, I’m not quite sure, however, after my first experience with testing taking place after I had written the code, it’s definitely an adjustment to attempt writing tests before writing code. That and the syntax, while similar, is a bit different, so I need to get my head wrapped around that.

Luckily I’m quite familiar with pure Ruby and Rails. Perl was a completely new animal aside from editing a couple of pre-made scripts throughout the year.

So, at this point in time, I’m focused on the following:

learning about writing unit tests before writing code.
getting a greater understanding of the testing syntax in ruby.
something not mentioned in the prior paragraph(s) – learning how much validation I need to put in my rails models.

Oh, and one more thing before I catch up on some reading – I watched a screencast put out by RailsEnvy. The screencast was a tutorial on Active Record/ActiveRecord. It helped immensely.

mindful iterations: Unit Testing: Perl & Ruby on Rails

Unit Testing: Perl & Ruby on Rails

Switching Gears