Software Engineering Essential Reading 1 - Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

Under the title "Software Engineering Essential Reading" I plan to share short reviews of books and articles I find most useful and an essential read for every software engineer.

First up is an (in my opinion) outstanding book on Test Driven Development (TDD) written by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. The title is "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests" and, as the title suggests, this book is more about how to successfully build changeable and maintainable software using TDD than a technical book on a specific testing framework. Sure, through the book they are using jUnit 4.x and jMock2, but the book is not a go-through of framework features, rather it uses lots of example code to show how they "grow" (just like a gardener does with flowers) software. These frameworks just happens to be their favorite tools.

The book roughly consists of three parts:

1. First the authors go over their motivation for TDD and the principles and techniques they apply to both testing and OO-design and -implementation. Part of this is really heuristics to follow for a clean, readable and maintainable design of production code which also is greatly discusses in other books, but I like the fact that it is included here because it brings the whole picture of responsible software development rather than just explaining TDD ripped out of its context.
   
2. In the second part they go through a long (about 150 pages) example of "growing" an application using the principles an techniques from part 1. The example is very well done and easy to follow. In the beginning I felt it was very valuable, but at the end I thought it was running a bit long. But just as I was about to skip some pages the book went on into part three.
   
3. In the last part they wrap up and enforces their key ideas by going over their principles in more depth backed-up with the examples from part two. In many passages this part is so dense and right-to-the-spot that you have to pause a minute or so after each paragraph just to think over the truths that just were brought to you.

All in all, this is a truly great book and I would say it goes straight to the top of all SE-related books I've ever read. I strongly recommend anyone engaged in software development to get a copy.