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Pragmatic Project Automation
The first 2 (or possibly 3) books are Pragmatic Version Control with CVS and Pragmatic Unit Testing (which is available in Java and .NET flavours).
Pragmatic Project Automation is the latest book in the series and, interestingly, this book wasn't actually written by either Dave Thomas or Andy Hunt, but by Mike Clark (contributor to the 'Bitter EJB' book, editor of the JUnit FAQ, and responsible for the JUnitPerf and JDepend tools). Mike does a great job of ensuring this book fits in with the overall style of the other books in the series.
Up front, in case you're a "cut to the chase kind of guy," this book (and the others in the series) are must-haves and as a consultant with ThoughtWorks I'll have a set ready to distribute whenever I start working with a new client team.
Content The book helps the reader build a Java project slowly over the chapters, starting with a manual build-and-deploy process and automating a new aspect of it, chapter by chapter, until by the end of the book the software compiles, archives, deploys and configures itself multiple times a day. In addition, the build tools notify you of success or failure in a variety of interesting ways including email, SMS messages and different colored lava lamps.
The first chapter provides a good introduction to the different types of automation available to projects. It also introduces the acronym 'CRISP' to help the reader remember the desirable characteristics of an ideal build process: Complete, Repeatable, Informative, Scheduled and Portable.
Chapter 2 gets you Repeatable by using ANT to bring together all the various steps you currently perform on your project into a single, one-click build. Chapter 3 works to turn the one-click build into a no-click build using tools as simple as cron as well as more complicated tools like the ANT scheduling tool CruiseControl. By the end of these two chapters your software can be compiling and testing itself automatically each time changes are checked into the version control system. But this is only the beginning.
Chapters 4 and 5 address the "Complete" and "Portable" portions of the CRISP model discussing how to include packaging, release management and deployment into your scheduled build. The last chapter addresses "Informative." How to monitor the build for success or failure, how to notify members of the project team using email, SMS, RSS or even the red and green Lava Lamps I mentioned above.
Summary This book, and the others in the series, provide a much needed set of manuals for getting a good set of basic practices up and running at the start of a project. Unlike the Unit Testing book, there's not a lot of programming in this one, but it's a worthwhile read for any programmer, regardless of experience level.
Many people are becoming interested in eXtreme Programming and Agile methods for software development. These books help to support some of the key ideas of those methods - extensive unit testing and continuous integration.
The main flaw in the book doesn't affect its usefulness, only its readability. Of all the files used in the sample project, the only one covered in any detail is the build file. The source and manifest files that we're writing the ANT file to build are never discussed or described - we are left to guess at what the sample project might contain (unless we download the code from the website). While this didn't change what I was learning (how to manipulate the project files with ANT), I like to understand all the details and this omission did occasionally leave me a little irritated.
You can purchase Pragmatic Project Automation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you are interested in the Pragmatic Programmers, see also this interview linked earlier from Slashdot.
...I've integrated it into our hourly build; it's handy info.
The Army reading list
This is a nice little book. Don't forget the web site either.
.. why didn't I think of this before??
.. once you get a taste you start doing it all the time and your productivity goes up yet another notch.
I'm not a Java programmer (mostly Ruby and Perl) but I found a lot of stuff in this book inspiring. After reading this book I got bitten by the automation bug and did stuff like this:
* gave my big deployed apps RSS feed logging for errors (i.e., now I can track recent warnings and errors in apps deployed across the country, just in NetNewsWire)
* wrote a ruby script to automatically run unit tests whenever the files change.. based on a script on the web site. this is really cool! You edit your source file, save it, and pause to glance at the unit test window. again, why on earth didn't I think of this before!
* wrote an automated test framework using WWW::Mechanize to log into web apps and check for errors or anything else and send out emails
* use a nightly cron to check latest code out of CVS, run all tests, and run web tests..
Anyway "project automation" is like unit testing
So even if you don't do Java you can find a lot of ideas in this book (like the lava lamps showing build status!)
On the other hand, there is Test Environment Toolkit that noone seems to use. And STAF which requires a huge investment of time just to comprehend.
So, question: what tools do people find useful for build/test automation with C++ ?
Test 1 2 3 4
the more you know to develop your own syntax within your C is the better; to build your own Abstraction Layer. ...Unix was not supposted to be an Operating System but an actual behavioral API for how code may interact with foreign code upon differing architectures.
Use Java Language (cleaner syntax than C), with the Java Virtual Machine (abstraction layer) and the Java libraries (API that works on different architectures) and problem solved.
"I think this line is mostly filler"