Okay, so, for the record with this review, The Minitest Cookbook was not the book I needed, nor expected. Take the rest of this review with a grain of salt as a result of that disclaimer.

I've been writing code that is tested with minitest tests for nearly a year now. I find that my understanding of when to use mocks versus stubs versus expects versus pick something else, to be somewhat lacking. Sure, I can cut and paste another test and modify as I need to modify it to fit my particular test case, but I don't want to copy and modify a test. I want to understand the reasoning behind what I'm doing and create a test, to understand "this is what I'm testing and this is how I go about it." Being able to do that quickly requires that I understand the system that I'm working on as a whole perhaps better than I do, but being able to do it without a full understanding is needed at this point.

So, I picked up this book as the recommended minitest book. Lots of favorable reviews, this is the book you want if you're learning minitest.

Except, it isn't.

It's too complicated for beginners (are n00b or newbies still derogatory terms, or have they been embraced by beginners - I guess if beginners are okay with being called dummies, they're okay with being n00bs), and not well organized for an intermediate user. I'd consider myself halfway between those two designations, so figured I'd get it, but, eh, didn't really work out that way.

Seems disingenuous to call this a cookbook. I understand Chris' reasoning and desire for a cookbook, but this isn't really a recipe book I can grab from and immediately have a tasty dish / running tests. 60% of the book was (and this is VERY specific to me) worthless for me as we don't use the Spec part of the minitest suite, and I'm not likely to write a minitest plugin any time soon.

Yeah, so, I'm not the target audience for this book, I didn't find it helpful (FOR ME, I feel I need to qualify that) for anything other than an overview of intermediate minitest thoughts from an advanced minitest developer thinking he's writing for the junior devs, though he's not; and pointers to other thoughts (which I found useful). I'd likely say skip it to my coworkers, along with, "Read http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html twice, then come talk to me and we'll walk through it."

Okay, I read this one again, since the first reading was before I knew what things were and why I was doing things and oh, god, what have I gotten myself into? Helps to have development under your belt for these things.

This book was recommended to me as the book to learn Rails development. It has two main sections: a hands-on let's-build-a-rails-app section, and a here-are-the-explanations section. The first is designed to guide you through building an application with Rails, the second to explain what the hell just happened and how all the parts fit together. The book builds a slight e-commerce platform: a store's product display / catalog, administration section, shopping cart, checkout and user authentication. The example is great, I definitely liked that it wasn't a blog or a twitter client.

The book is good and it works. It is not the book for new developers, however. It uses a lot of words and concepts without explaining them, assuming the reader knows what they mean. And this is okay. The book is for a developer who is learning Rails. It does that well.

Time-wise, if you're going to read the book and do the exercises (say, a new employer is giving you a chance to come up to speed with Rails, or the first couple weeks of work to learn), give yourself 2 work weeks to go through it. You can do it faster (you can always do things faster), but doing the exercises and typing things in and playing around with things relevant-to but not part-of the lessons is what makes learning better. So, yeah, play around, poke around, learn something outside the lesson for greater good.

That all said ("that" being, yes, I, too, recommend this book for developers learning Rails, not new developers), if you're learning Rails, it's not my first recommendation. As someone who does not like learning from videos, and much prefers the written word, I have to say my first recommendation is The Pragmatic Studio's Rails series for beginners learning how to develop Rails applications. The cost difference is significant, though, so it might not be feasible for the solo developer. For a company that wants developers coming through, the video series is worth the investment, and can be done in about two work weeks.