The Book

"Test-Driven Web Development with Python" aims to teach TDD for web programming. It uses a concrete example -- the development of a website, from scratch -- to explain the TDD metholology and how it applies to building web applications. It covers the Selenium browser-automation tool, unit testing, mocking, and interacting with Web technologies from the basics of static content, database integration, throught the inescapable JavaScript, and onto more advanced (and trendy) topics like NoSQL, websockets and Async programming.

Reading it

There are lots of ways you can read this book:

Or read it here for free

Help yourself! It's all free and CC-licenced (thanks O'Reilly!). I see this as a "try-before-you-buy" scheme, and I hope that if you enjoy it you'll buy a copy -- if not for yourself, then perhaps for a friend!

Table of contents follows:

Introduction:

• Praise for Test-Driven Development with Python
• Preface
• Preface to the Third Edition: TDD in the age of AI
• Prerequisites and Assumptions
• Companion Video
• Acknowledgments

Part 1: The Basics of TDD and Django

• Chapter 1: Getting Django Set Up Using a Functional Test
• Chapter 2: Extending Our Functional Test Using the unittest Module
• Chapter 3: Testing a Simple Home Page with Unit Tests
• Chapter 4: What Are We Doing with All These Tests? (And, Refactoring)
• Chapter 5: Saving User Input: Testing the Database
• Chapter 6: Improving Functional Tests: Ensuring Isolation and Removing Voodoo Sleeps
• Chapter 7: Working Incrementally
• Chapter 8: Prettification: Layout and Styling, and What to Test About It

Part 2: Going To Production

• Chapter 9: Containerization aka Docker
• Chapter 10: Making Our App Production-Ready
• Chapter 11: Getting A Server Ready For Deployment
• Chapter 12: Infrastructure As Code: Automated Deployments With Ansible

Part 3: Forms and Validation

• Chapter 13: Splitting Our Tests into Multiple Files, and a Generic Wait Helper
• Chapter 14: Validation at the Database Layer
• Chapter 15: A Simple Form
• Chapter 16: More Advanced Forms

Part 4: More Advanced Topics in Testing

• Chapter 17: A Gentle Excursion Into JavaScript
• Chapter 18: Deploying Our New Code
• Chapter 19: User Authentication, Spiking, and De-Spiking
• Chapter 20: Using Mocks to Test External Dependencies
• Chapter 21: Using Mocks for Test Isolation
• Chapter 22: Test Fixtures and a Decorator for Explicit Waits
• Chapter 23: Debugging And Testing Server Issues
• Chapter 24: Finishing "My Lists": Outside-In TDD
• Chapter 25: CI: Continuous Integration
• Chapter 26: The Token Social Bit, the Page Pattern, and an Exercise for the Reader
• Chapter 27: Fast Tests, Slow Tests, and Hot Lava

Epilogue: Obey the Testing Goat!

Appendices

• Appendix A: The Subtleties of Functionally Testing External Dependencies
• Appendix B: Continuous Deployment (CD)
• Appendix C: Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) Tools
• Appendix D: Test Isolation, and "Listening to Your Tests"
• Appendix E: Building a REST API: JSON, Ajax, and Mocking with JavaScript
• Appendix F: Cheat Sheet
• Appendix G: What to Do Next
• Appendix H: Source Code Examples
• Bibliography

How to comment or get in touch

I am far from the ultimate authority on TDD, and I'm always interested in talking about TDD, so do get in touch.

There's a comment system here for each individual chapter, so feel free to use that.

If you'd like to fix a typo, you can open a Pull Request at https://github.com/hjwp/Book-TDD-Web-Dev-Python/pulls

If you'd like to have a more philosophical discussion, or talk about anything Python or TDD-related, you can get in touch with me directly via

I look forward to hearing from you.

Read the book

The book is available both for free and for money. It's all about TDD and Web programming. Read it here!

Reviews & Testimonials

"Hands down the best teaching book I've ever read" — "Even the first 4 chapters were worth the money" — "Oh my gosh! This book is outstanding" — "The testing goat is my new friend" — Read more...

Resources

A selection of links and videos about TDD, not necessarily all mine, eg this tutorial at PyCon 2013, how to motivate coworkers to write unit tests, thoughts on Django's test tools, London-style TDD and more.

Old TDD / Django Tutorial

This is my old TDD tutorial, which follows along with the official Django tutorial, but with full TDD. It badly needs updating. Read the book instead!

Save the Testing Goat Campaign

The campaign page, preserved for history, which led to the glorious presence of the Testing Goat on the front of the book.