Goal
The path to "xUnit Test Patterns"
Here is the reading path leading up to this book, derived from its dependencies and ordered from the fundamentals.
The path so far (4 books)
Why read this first: After grasping the basics of readability such as naming and function decomposition, you move on to binding them into principles of why. Clean Code connects individual techniques into a coherent system of craftsmanship and design principles.
Why read this first: After adopting the pragmatic mindset of keeping code healthy, you ground those attitudes in concrete quality standards at the function and class level. Clean Code systematizes what good code is through principles and worked examples.
Why read this first: To keep writing clean code, you need a foundation that lets you change it without fear. Test-driven development instills the discipline of growing clean, working code in small cycles, turning quality into a habit.
Why read this first: Test-Driven Development: By Example builds the habit of writing tests first, through a multi-currency exercise and a small xUnit framework written from scratch. xUnit Test Patterns takes the resulting test code as its subject: it organizes fixture setup and teardown, result verification and test doubles as patterns, and uses a catalog of 18 test smells to trace problems to their causes. It belongs after the habit is in place, when the tests have to be kept maintainable.