fred.dixon wrote: >:) unit test is something on my to-learn list. seems involved and i > haven't seen any straight forward tutorials yet. as yet i still > consider myself a hobbyist at best. > Hmm, I believe you are right. I can't see any straight-forward tutorials which use Python. I found a tutorial at onlamp.com, but it doesn't seem to me to explain TDD at all clearly.
Kent Beck's book is pretty good except that the main tutorial is in Java rather than Python, and the Python section tells you how to write a new unit test harness (using TDD). So it won't tell you how to use the unittest module, but if you use the Python documentation for that (library reference, chapter 5.3) you should be able to follow the Java tutorial converting it into Python as you go. (Likewise, I've worked through the Python chapter converting that into another language when there wasn't a suitable xUnit harness available). It is one of those things that, once you get the hang of it, really grows on you: for me the turning point was the first time I added some code and a completely unrelated test which had been working fine up until that point, and which could not possibly be affected by the latest change, suddenly broke. At that point I realised I had just saved myself considerable debugging time as without the tests I wouldn't have realised I had introduced a problem until much later. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
