Perl Testing:
A Developer's Notebook
I. Langworth & chromatic
O'Reilly Media
ISBN: 0-596-10092-2
182 Pages
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perltestingadn/

This book is one of the highly focused "Developer's Notebook" series. This book covers writing tests using Perl's Test Anything Protocol "TAP". Though most of the book is targeted at writing tests in Perl for Perl, it also covers using TAP to test non Perl applications.

If you are a Perl developer then this is an excellent guide to quickly writing useful tests. If you already know Perl testing, then borrow the book first - you may or may not learn something, however do have a look there is bound to be something useful in it.

The books style is not-dissimilar to the cookbook approach by O'Reilly. Each chapter has several related examples or recipes followed by a discussion around each one. Topics include:
* TAP basics
* Test management
* Distributing tests
* Test mocking
* Testing databases
* Testing websites
* Unit testing
* Testing everything else

The fake lab notebook style is a bit frivolous and the grid pattern that the books are printed on is not to my liking, plus the faux coffee mug ring stains are annoying. The content more than makes up for the silly presentation though.

This is one of the books I wish I'd bought earlier I found it so useful. If you are doing testing with Perl then this is the book for you. It is a slim volume so don't pay full price for it, you should be able to get it for GBP14/USD20 or less.

See also:
* http://edinburgh.pm.org/book-reviews/perl-testing-developers-notebook.html