Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

You will learn Selenium!

To begin with, in my opinion this book is for more experienced developers who are ready to take Selenium testing to the next level.
I’ve been exposed to programming for about 2 years, starting with Ruby and currently learning some Java. While this book focuses primarily on using Ruby as the preferred language, have no doubt that Selenium can be used with Java as well.
One of the strongest points of this technical book is that the author can convey advantages as well as disadvantages in a clear and concise manner. I have found that this helps greatly to see what is important and seeing possible downsides to a chosen path.
Through showing us how software testing works from the first chapter, the author leads us through various examples and patterns in the current world of testing. It is up to date and includes relevant information now in 2014.
In addition to explaining testing with the Selenium suite, the author also focuses on code reuse and refactoring, which will further help you grow as a programmer/developer. In Chapter 4, he also explains in depth test data and the various nuances associated with it.
As the author states, you should be able to follow along the examples in this book with relative ease, but if you can’t the appendix will help you with setting up Ruby on your computer, how to use the command line interface, installing the Selenium Webdriver gem, as well as getting it to work in Firefox. His examples are honed by years of experience in software testing, so everything is explained as simply as possible for a beginner or an experienced developer. The screenshots will help you immensely to see what the author means and overall, will provide for an enjoyable experience reading this software testing book.
I have found that this book not only taught me about Selenium testing, but also broadened my knowledge about Ruby programming as well as browser elements and using the Selenium plug in to the fullest in Firefox. There is much to be learned about the browser locator in Chapter 2 as well, which I highly recommend to review.
In the test data chapter, the author clearly and concisely explains to the reader what kinds of data is available and the benefits/disadvantages of each. What I really liked is that the author touches on topics about BDD, Rspec, as well as Cucumber and CI tools.
In conclusion, I would highly recommend this guide to anyone already testing or looking to start testing in the open source tool that is Selenium. In addition, you will learn many helpful tips for software development in general, like I have. I look forward to any future works by this author.