Test-Driven JavaScript Development

Product Author Bios

Christian Johansen works for Shortcut AS, a software company focusing on open source technology, Web, and mobile applications. Originally a student in informatics, mathematics, and digital signal processing, he has spent his professional career specializing in Web and front-end development with technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. His clients include many of Norway’s largest financial, telecom, and healthcare companies. A frequent open source contributor, he blogs about JavaScript, Ruby, and Web development at cjohansen.no/en.

For JavaScript developers working on increasingly large and complex projects, effective automated testing is crucial to success. Test-Driven JavaScript Development is a complete, best-practice guide to agile JavaScript testing and quality assurance with the test-driven development (TDD) methodology. Leading agile JavaScript developer Christian Johansen covers all aspects of applying state-of-the-art automated testing in JavaScript environments, walking readers through the entire development lifecycle, from project launch to application deployment, and beyond.

Using real-life examples driven by unit tests, Johansen shows how to use TDD to gain greater confidence in your code base, so you can fearlessly refactor and build more robust, maintainable, and reliable JavaScript code at lower cost. Throughout, he addresses crucial issues ranging from code design to performance optimization, offering realistic solutions for developers, QA specialists, and testers.

Coverage includes
•    Understanding automated testing and TDD
•    Building effective automated testing workflows
•    Testing code for both browsers and servers (using Node.js)
•    Using TDD to build cleaner APIs, better modularized code, and more robust software
•    Writing testable code
•    Using test stubs and mocks to test units in isolation
•    Continuously improving code through refactoring
•    Walking through the construction and automated testing of fully functional software

The accompanying Web site, tddjs.com, contains all of the book’s code listings and additional resources.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I: Test-Driven Development

Chapter 1: Automated Testing

Chapter 2: The Test Driven Development Process

Chapter 3: Tools of the Trade

Chapter 4: Test to Learn

Part II: JavaScript for Programmers

Chapter 5: Functions

Chapter 6: Applied Functions and Closures

Chapter 7: Objects and Prototypal Inheritance

Chapter 8: ECMAScript 5th Edition

Chapter 9: Unobtrusive JavaScript

Chapter 10: Feature Detection

Part III: Real-World Test Driven Development in JavaScript

Chapter 11: The Observer Pattern

Chapter 12: Abstracting Browser Differences: Ajax

Chapter 13: Streaming Data With Ajax and Comet

Chapter 14: Server-Side JavaScript With Node.js

Chapter 15: TDD and DOM Manipulation: The Chat Client

Part IV: Testing Patterns

Chapter 16: Mocking and Stubbing

Chapter 17: Writing Good Unit Tests

Index