Test-Driven Development with Python: Obey the Testing Goat: Using Django, Selenium, and JavaScript

From the Preface

Aims of This Book

My main aim is to impart a methodology—a way of doing web development, which I think makes for better web apps and happier developers. There’s not much point in a book that just covers material you could find by Googling, so this book isn’t a guide to Python syntax, or a tutorial on web development per se. Instead, I hope to teach you how to use TDD to get more reliably to our shared, holy goal: clean code that works.

With that said: I will constantly refer to a real practical example, by building a web app from scratch using tools like Django, Selenium, jQuery, and Mock. I’m not assuming any prior knowledge of any of these, so you should come out of the other end of this book with a decent introduction to those tools, as well as the discipline of TDD.

In Extreme Programming we always pair-program, so I’ve imagined writing this book as if I was pairing with my previous self, having to explain how the tools work and answer questions about why we code in this particular way.

So, if I ever take a bit of a patronising tone, it’s because I’m not all that smart, and I have to be very patient with myself. And if I ever sound defensive, it’s because I’m the kind of annoying person that systematically disagrees with whatever anyone else says, so sometimes it takes a lot of justifying to convince myself of anything.