It starts off with the basics of setting up MySQL for your testing/development needs by going over several of the common installation and configuration methods. After that it’s a quick intro for connection methods and simple error reporting for connections. The author gives a quick intro to CRUD and how it relates to databases and python before heading into the common tasks of simple queries. I was surprised to see some database profiling discussion; which is rather handy for a new coder or a person new to MySQL. Once the basics of Inserts/Selects/Updates/Deletes are covered, which is a rather quick read, there is a welcome discussion of transactions and commit methods – if you do not read this section and are new to MySQL then believe me, you’re missing a very important topic. Most people will gloss over the basics and head right to the more advanced chapters that feature exception handling, the all too common “the mysql server has gone away” error, date&time functions, aggregate functions, and metadata queries. These chapters were the most interesting to me as they covered some great code for python that I have not yet played around with. Previously I’ve done a lot of work on those topics with perl and php so seeing how they were done in python was a great treat. The code is concise, easy to read, and well explained.

A number of topics cover the time saving solutions that no one should be without. Namely, bulk data inserting, data formatting, row iteration, and CSV parsing. Logging methods for access and changes to the database are also covered, and in the end will save your development cycle a lot of time when you are troubleshooting app-to-db interaction.

Two chapters will be of interest to DBAs in particular, and possibly not as interesting to pure developers, of which these are the Disaster Recovery and MySQL Administration topics. The author covers offline backups as well as online hot backups, two sections that no DBA should be without. The code for this type of work is covered in a decent amount of discussion but, along with the other chapters in the book, the theory and background of the topic is also discussed which gives the new reader an understanding of “why” and not just left with the “how”. The administration section of the book covers user creation and permissions management, along with a bit of background on security involved with that task, and also goes into quite a lot of coverage on web-based GUI administration and command line interaction for admin purposes.

Overall I enjoyed the contents of the book and would recommend taking a look if you are new to Python and MySQL or are even looking for a quick reference to the common tasks of database driven application development. This book does not cover the common ORM database interactions you’re likely to see in an app like Django or Pylons, but it will give you a solid foundation on how python and MySQL interact without an abstraction layer. If you are writing quick admin code or building your own database interaction layer, then this book would do well to be in your collection.

You can find the book at Amazon or directly from Packt.

The book starts out very quickly with details about the various methods that are available, the means of automation for testing, and of course the environment you’d want to be in for working on the subjects that the book covers. It then, in the second chapter, moves into the guts of testing by describing the basics of doctest via syntax and some simple examples, and then moves on to a real world example via the AVL tree. It’s all very basic testing until chapter three where the author gets into unit testing, which is probably the most useful method in my opinion, and he goes to prove it’s usefulness with examples of it’s use in different parts and stages of the development process. Later in the book the python mocker is used to separate unit sections, and then the actual unittest framework is discussed with more examples and a enough details that if you don’t understand it by then, you may never. By chapter six we are into the Nose app that drives the unittest, which is very useful of course.

The most useful part of the book comes toward the end where the author discusses and the walks through the method used to create a test-driven application and then even shows examples via the whole chapter dedicated towards making a testable web application frontend. Very impressive for such a quick read. Integration testing and System testing is also covered, thankfully. The final chapter covers some useful tools and techniques of which I particularly enjoyed the section on version control hooks. If you are not using version control in your development process you need to start now, as such the hooks for integration with the test framework are rather useful to know.

Overall this is a very nice book that discusses python application testing from the ground up. It’s perfect for a beginner or an intermediate python programmer that has little to no experience in automated testing methods. More advanced programmers that have already used these methods will probably not find the book too useful except for the last chapter that covers extra tools and techniques that they might not have seen before. If I didn’t have this book and needed to learn about python testing, it would be my first choice and my only recommendation so far. Well written and very useful.

If there is one thing I do not like about the book, it would be the reliance on the python CLI for running commands. I am a CLI kind of person and I keep lots of terminals open at the same time, so I prefer to write my code in an editor or IDE in one term tab, then switch to another and execute the script; I do not use the python command line to do much of anything. So following some of the steps in the book require that you follow the CLI method and that gets old for me. It’s a personal preference but one worth noting as there is a lot of it in the book. That’s the only thing I did not enjoy in a book that was otherwise basically perfect for the subject.

The book is not a thousand plus pages type of computer manual. It gets the important points out in a very readable and organized method without winding the user through overly extensive examples. What you get with this book is everything you need to know about combining SVN with Trac without the fluff of other manuals.

In regard to the application of this book, it fits several groups of users; managers that need to understand how their software development team is managing code – or wants to implement a more productive system for their software team, the software developers themselves that need to get up to speed on these most important of technologies, as well as up and coming technologists that want to learn about the code development and management process. Its well roundedness is one of the best features.

The content is broken up into several sections: content management basics, Trac and SVN basics, trac and svn setup and integration, documentation creation and management, code management, and then very useful appendixes for the actual install process of apache, SVN, and Trac. Each section has everything you need to get started and finished in quick order. The author is showing that the processes involved in code management do not have to be stressful or difficult to learn.

The author stresses several key ideas before getting into the meat of the content. These being “everything is a task”, “small steps are better”, “communication is key”, “content management is what software development requires for success.” Overall the two main division of labor is between task management and communication between team members.

Overall this is a very useful book on the subject of code management and documentation. I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn about the processes involved as well as anyone that wants a reference manual for growing their technology bookshelf.

I’ve recently been migrating my wiki/documentation for Kontrollbase to Trac. For those that are not aware, Trac is a web-based documentation/wiki/Subversion tool that is used by countless number of software projects. Subversion, of course, is a software collaboration and code management repository that manages branches/tags/trunk files with revision control. It’s one of the most heavily used open-source code repositories available. Given that I use SVN (subversion) for all of my software applications and am now using Trac, the book “Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion” by David J Murphy comes as a useful and great resource for integrating these two useful tools.

The book is not a thousand plus pages type of computer manual. It gets the important points out in a very readable and organized method without winding the user through overly extensive examples. What you get with this book is everything you need to know about combining SVN with Trac without the fluff of other manuals.

In regard to the application of this book, it fits several groups of users; managers that need to understand how their software development team is managing code – or wants to implement a more productive system for their software team, the software developers themselves that need to get up to speed on these most important of technologies, as well as up and coming technologists that want to learn about the code development and management process. Its well roundedness is one of the best features.

The content is broken up into several sections: content management basics, Trac and SVN basics, trac and svn setup and integration, documentation creation and management, code management, and then very useful appendixes for the actual install process of apache, SVN, and Trac. Each section has everything you need to get started and finished in quick order. The author is showing that the processes involved in code management do not have to be stressful or difficult to learn.

The author stresses several key ideas before getting into the meat of the content. These being “everything is a task”, “small steps are better”, “communication is key”, “content management is what software development requires for success.” Overall the two main division of labor is between task management and communication between team members.

Overall this is a very useful book on the subject of code management and documentation. I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn about the processes involved as well as anyone that wants a reference manual for growing their technology bookshelf. You can find the book at the Packt Publishing website here.