Learning Test-Driven Development

Chapter 0: Introduction and Setup

Squeaky clean code is critical to success.

Ron Jeffries, “Clean Code: A Learning,” Aug 23, 2017, ronjeffries.com

Before we start our journey into the demanding and rewarding world of test-driven development, we need to ensure we have a working development environment. This chapter is all about preparing and setting things up.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Regardless of which reading pathway you follow (see Figure P-2), you need a clean development environment to follow this book. The rest of the book assumes that you have set up the development environment as described in this section.

Important

Regardless of which of Go, JavaScript, or Python you start with, set up your development environment as described in this section.

Common Setup

Folder structure

Create a folder that will be the root for all the source code we’ll write in this book. Name it something that will be clear and unambiguous to you weeks from now, e.g., tdd-project.

Under this folder, create a set of folders as follows:

tdd-project
├── go
├── js
└── py

Create all these folders before you write the first line of code, even if you’re planning to follow this book in multiple passes, one language at a time. Creating this folder structure provides the following benefits:

1. It keeps code in the three languages separate yet in close proximity to each other.

2. It ensures that most commands in this book will work without changes.

   • Commands that deal with fully qualified ...