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Changes for the Second Edition
A lot has changed in the Rails testing world over the past five years, even if
the general principles stayed more or less the same. This book has been
substantially rewritten from its first edition, with almost no part of the book
unchanged. Here’s a more complete list of changes. (Not all of these changes
will be in the early beta versions.)
• All tools have been upgraded to their latest versions: Rails 4.1.x, Minitest
5.3.x, RSpec 3, and so on.
• The opening tutorial was completely re-written. It’s an all new example
which provides, I hope, a more gentle introduction to testing in Rails.
• The code samples in general are better. In the first book, a lot of the
samples after the tutorial were not part of the distributed code. Most of
the samples in this book will tie back to the tutorial, and are runnable.
• The JavaScript chapter is nearly completely new to reflect changes both
in tools and in the scope of JavaScript in most Rails appictions.
• There is an all-new chapter on testing external services
• There is an all-new chapter on testing for security
• A new chapter on debugging and troubleshooting. (Not in the initial beta)
• A new chapter on running tests more efficiently, looking at both the
Spring/Zeus preloader option and the don’t load Rails, plain old Ruby
object option.
• Somewhat more emphasis, I hope, on using testing in practice, somewhat
less on duplicating reference information.
• Some thing that were full chapters in the first book are de-emphasized,
and covered sparingly if at all: Shoulda (since it’s not really used anymore),
Rails core integration tests (in lieu of spending more time on Capybara),
Rcov, and Rails core performance testing.
Most importantly the entire community, including myself, has had five more
years of experience with these tools, building bigger and better applications,
learning what tools work, what tools scale, and what tools don’t. This version
of the book reflects these changes.