When people first start to learn how to program it is always the flashy, forward facing aspects of development that most people gravitate too. It might be creating some sort of beautiful, dynamic interface, or writing complex algorithms that set your program apart from everyone else. But the reality is that a lot of the time spent programming is doing debugging, and making sure error handling is managed correctlyand writing unit tests. Those tasks are certainly less exciting, but also critical to making apps work well. The latter of those tasks, unit tests, is particularly important, and often ignored, which is where test driven development (TDD) comes into play. The shortest explanation of what TDD is would be that it is a paradigm for developing in which you write unit tests first, and then the necessary code to make those tests pass. With this development workflow you cannot ignore unit tests because without them your code cannot exist.

Test Driven iOS Development with Swift by Dr. Dominik Hauser (USD 31.99) is not for the faint of heart. You need to have a strong understanding of Swift and iOS development going into it. This definitely falls into the category of advanced level topics. It is also going to require a real investment of time. Three quarters of the book is a single tutorial that takes you through the process of TDD by creating a ToDo list app. If you are not going to commit to working through the whole book then I would suggest you simply skip getting the book. But, if you have a specific need to learn TDD, or have a strong suspicion this is going to be something you want to learn and implement in your own workflow, then by all means keep reading to see what this book is about. Read More